A4 Valentine’s Day Special Event: Action! Start Shooting/Rehearsing!

Using sound waves as a medium, this is a conversation between the body and architecture. Li Tavor’s unconventional sound piece dispenses with all visual stimuli, requiring the audience to experience it through every pore by listening alone.

The artist activates the small theater with ten speakers facing different directions, transforming it into an acoustic mirror palace. Before reaching the listener’s ears, the sound is first reflected off the building’s structure. As the audience moves around, they navigate through the reflections of sound waves. A series of consecutive sine waves embrace each other, creating specific acoustic phenomena such as beats. Through extensive reflection, reverberation, temporal iteration, and overlapping with the sound source, the sound enters our eardrums, but its original characteristics and essence have been transformed. The restless sound continues its dynamic existence in a static present, with various potential associative meanings. Listeners gradually lose any sense of reference to the metric time system, lured into following alternative concepts of time. Music, sound, and sound waves, as physical entities, delineate the entity of space, guiding you to perceive the boundaries of flow.

Li Tavor, born in 1983, is a musician, composer, performance artist, sound artist, and architect currently based in Zurich. Her artistic practice often integrates multiple modes of interaction between sound, space, and perception, exploring underlying relationships within architectural environments. Li Tavor has served as a research assistant in the Department of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), a visiting professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University), and a lecturer for the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at Zurich University of the Arts.

Together with Alessandro Bosshard, Matthew van der Ploeg, and Ani Vihervaara, Li Tavor was selected by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia as the curatorial team for the Swiss Pavilion at the 16th Venice International Architecture Biennale. Their exhibition “Svizzera 240: House Tour” was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.

Li Tavor has received the Swiss Art Awards and has exhibited her work worldwide, including venues such as the Swiss Institute in Milan (Istituto Svizzero Milano), Gessnerallee Theater in Zurich, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (NGV Melbourne), the Architecture Foundation in London, and the Kunsthaus Bregenz. She has also participated in events such as the Zurich Theater Spectacle (Theaterspektakel Zurich), the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and the São Paulo Architecture Biennial.

The work “Coffee” originated from the collaboration between Chen Kong and Dino Radončić in 2020, based on their project “Dumplings.” Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chen Kong was invited to the PARTOUT: Live Art Workshop in Switzerland, where one of the participating artists couldn’t attend physically. Therefore, Swiss artist Dino Radončić was invited as a “transmitter” to complete the artwork remotely.

As good friends who couldn’t physically meet, they based their project on a series of actions over 33 days to experience each other’s presence. They agreed to perform simultaneously at different times but during the same time slot: Dino would be at the live site in Switzerland, making and eating dumplings according to Chen Kong’s dumpling menu, while Chen Kong in China would imagine and textually describe Dino’s dumpling-making process in real-time via WeChat. In the end, they completed the entire performance without responding to each other. In the context of globalization and the pandemic, they used their actions to address their own questions about distance and human relationships, and to explore the concepts of true distance and existence.

Like dumplings, coffee is also something that connects us. As Dino previously mentioned:

“Bosnians always sit down for coffee, no matter when. Coffee is the best reason to meet. ‘I’m coming over for coffee,’ ‘Did you already make coffee? I’ll be down in two minutes.’ Whenever there’s something to celebrate or worry about, coffee is always a part of the moment.”

For us, everyday actions (like cooking, drinking coffee, taking walks, dancing, painting, etc.) give us the opportunity to momentarily detach from life and focus on daydreaming, memories, past times, and missing people. In this work, the audience can consider the performance as part of their rest, and join us in watching or executing very ordinary activities, such as preparing coffee, staying quiet, or focusing on the moment when water boils… to reconnect with ourselves and with others.

Dino Radončić lives and works in St. Gallen, Switzerland. He studied at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and is a member of the “RRRRRR” group along with Chen Kong, Stefan Stojanovic, and Nathalie Stirnimann. His artistic practice is centered around observing people’s everyday lives and experiences. Through ethnographic fieldwork, he immerses himself in the mundane aspects of life and transforms them into videos, performances, or artworks. He believes that traces of everyday life, regardless of their size or value, carry historical, cultural, and expressive significance.

Chen Kong, born in 1995, is from Chaozhou, Guangdong, and is often based in Hangzhou and Shanghai. She holds a Master’s degree from the School of Intermedia Art at China Academy of Art. She is a member of the Asia-Europe RRRRRR group, the Hangzhou Platform group, and the Echoing group. Her artistic practice primarily focuses on exploring and experimenting with live art, and she specializes in expressing the boundaries between theater art and performance art. Using the body as a foundation, she combines various media such as video, installation, and sound for independent and collaborative creation. Starting from everyday life, she communicates individual experiences with contemporary society, capturing the process of things disappearing from life and reappearing in life. Through collaborative practices with different organizations, she explores the collision of individual identities and social experiences in different cultural contexts.

“Spīro” means breath (souffle) and is the root of the word spirit (esprit). It is determined by Thumos (heart-blood) that governs the life energy.

Anne Rochat will present an interactive performance where her breath will be amplified by equipment and coexist harmoniously with the breath of online audiences. Humans live because of breath, and breath varies from person to person. This is a collective immersive experience that explores topics such as human coexistence and the relationship between humans and the world through the importance of breath. Using various microphones and recording devices, the artist amplifies her breath and transmits it remotely to a large audience. On one hand, her breath is processed through various synthesizers attached to her body; on the other hand, she uses various breathing techniques such as heart-coordinated, bellows-style, and breath-holding to turn each inhalation and exhalation into an audible language of breath, making her movements more immersive, thereby stimulating the life energy of individual and collective audiences.

The entire interaction will be conducted in English with Chinese interpretation available.

Anne Rochat graduated from the University of Lausanne and has traveled extensively in Asia. Between 2011 and 2012, she was in residence in Varanasi, India. She has received numerous prestigious awards, including the 2013 Irène Reymond Prize, the 2012 Kiefer Hablitzel Prize, the 2011 Cultural Grant from the Canton of Vaud, the 2010 Leenaards Foundation Cultural Grant, and the Swiss Awards from Art Basel. From 2017 to 2019, supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Anne Rochat conducted research residencies, tours, and exhibitions in China, collaborating with institutions such as Chongqing Yingzi Theater, Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, Chengdu Luohu · A4 Art Museum, Shanghai M50 Contemporary Art Space, and Wuhan 403 International Art Center.

Anne Rochat uses her body as the medium for her art, combining flexibility, strength, softness, robustness, wildness, and flexibility. Her movements are not necessarily coordinated and can even be absurd. However, she is innovative, daring to use taboo movements to express her artistic pursuit. Her performance art is a combination of sensuality and strength, gentleness and wildness, unsettling yet humorous, always following strict aesthetic guidelines. Her live performance art is exquisite and unconventional, always leaving audiences in awe.

The Megaphones Quartet is a live art project collaboratively created by Chen Ran, a resident artist at A4 Art Museum, and three artist friends he met in Chengdu: Gao Yuan, Yang Ran, and Deng Shangdong.

Using any number of handheld megaphones between 1 and 50, the four artists relay their creations in the small theater of A4 Art Museum. All the pieces are connected to form a performance, leaving traces of their works together in the same space.

The works include:

Gao Yuan’s “Cross-Running” Chen Ran’s “The Script is Written (And You Can Decide How to Perform)” Yang Ran’s “Resonance Protocol” Deng Shangdong’s “In Search of Megaphones”

Chen Ran is an independent theater director, sound designer, and writer. He was born in Fuzhou, Fujian, and currently lives in Beijing. He is the founder of StageNoMore Art Group and a co-curator of the SoundRoar Theater Festival. His artistic practice focuses on theater, sound, text, and image, exploring contemporary identity issues, digital existence, and how technology connects memory, the present, and the future. He has received residency grants from the German Theater and Digital Reality Institute and was nominated for Best New Director at the 2021 Shanghai “Yi Theater Awards.”

Gao Yuan was born in Xining, Qinghai Province, in 1981. He graduated from the Art Department of Qinghai Normal University in 2005 and from the Art Academy of Ukraine National Pedagogical University in 2007. In 2009, he initiated the Possibility Body Art Workshop in Xining. In 2012, he organized the performance art group “Collapse Group.” In 2016, he founded the non-profit art space “Xining Contemporary” in Xining. In 2022, he co-founded the Windhorse Art Store with Zeng Jie in Chengdu. His artistic practice is concept-based, spanning various media such as performance, video, film, installation, and everyday objects, focusing on the complex manifestations of the zeitgeist on individuals.

Yang Ran, born in Sichuan, focuses her work and research on transforming art into a method to explore the relationship between individual life sensations and subjective rational ethics construction. She practices in social and cultural contexts using perceptible media and methods. Currently, she is continuously rethinking and constructing new contexts and methods for working scenes, mainly focusing on actions such as images, live performances, events, bodies, and writing. She explores and organizes social participation in live scenes, making art a meeting place. She currently teaches at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Arts Theory and Management Department, as an associate professor.

Deng Shangdong, born in Sichuan in 1990, graduated from the Attached Middle School of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2009 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the School of Fine Arts, Chongqing Normal University, in 2013. He is a performance artist, photographer, and illustrator, the founder of the Ruins Site Art Festival, and the organizer of the Firebrand Performance Art Festival. His works focus on personal emotional experiences and the combination of real situations and personal experiences. His main creative methods are performance art, video, photography, and illustration. He focuses on the living conditions of young subcultures, presenting the real body views of young people today. He currently lives and works in Chengdu.

The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia is dedicated to promoting contemporary Swiss culture and arts both domestically and internationally. Established in Shanghai in 2010, the Pro Helvetia Shanghai office aims to support collaboration and exchange between Swiss and Chinese artists and institutions, facilitating the sharing of knowledge and experiences in the cultural field. Currently, the projects conducted by Pro Helvetia primarily focus on various domains of Swiss contemporary arts, including visual arts, design, architecture, music, and dance. Through these initiatives, Pro Helvetia provides a platform for Swiss artists to showcase their works and engage in dialogue with international counterparts, fostering cultural exchange and cooperation between Switzerland and China.

Location: A4 Art Museum 13:30-14:00 Registration 14:00-15:00 Curator’s Special Guided Tour for “Incredible Actions” Exhibition