Sound Everywhere: The Beijing Show Indexing Our Sonic World
Apr 2025
I remember the cultural vibrancy of Beijing in the 2010s. In the downtown area, people crowded into narrow hutongs (alleyways) for openings at small independent art spaces, impromptu performances unfolded on the streets, and 'live houses'—intimate venues for rock, jazz, and folk music, often doubling as bars—thrived. That energy has since been replaced by a thoroughly commercialised, touristic scene.
In China, as in many other places around the world, spaces in which sounds can emerge, converge, and orchestrate are rapidly disappearing—disrupted by urban development, and government policy. These included the 2017 Beijing government initiatives that forbade unregulated vendors selling goods from their windows, which contributed to the closure of many storefront spaces, including the legendary, artist-run Arrow Factory. Sound-art venues in Beijing are often short-lived, risking erasure from collective memory without dedicated efforts to preserve them. At the city's Inside-Out Art Museum, the exhibition It Always Sounds Somewhere takes up the mission of highlighting the essential role of documentation and materialisation in chronicling sound practices that tend towards the transient, especially in a society facing abrupt change.
While the subject of sound art has been explored previously in China—last year's international survey I Never Dream Otherwise than Awake: Journeys in Sound at Pompidou Westbund Museum in Shanghai, for instance—It Always Sounds Somewhere deliberately detours from the formal category of 'sound art'. Instead, it spotlights local, spontaneous practices that have existed primarily outside of institutional art systems, marking a milestone for many sound practitioners previously limited to smaller showcases at impermanent, underground spaces.
Both the exhibition's curator Edward Sanderson and I have lived in Beijing for more than a decade. Sanderson tells me that when he arrived in China in the 2010s, 'experimental sound art was not well-understood within the commercial art world'. Sound artists 'created space for work that wasn't particularly accepted in galleries, museums, or music venues, falling between two fields without fitting either'. With this exhibition, he decided to probe two fundamental questions relating to sound art: 'Why practise in sound when it's not widely accepted?' and 'What is possible or impossible in China specifically?'
Upon entering the show, the space immediately invites visitors to touch and interact with the work, and—most importantly—to listen to it. The open layout, scattered with interactive objects, home-printed materials, and DIY sculptures, combines with overlapping sounds to immerse the viewer in a dynamic experience.
The first artwork visitors encounter is Environment Improvisation (2008–ongoing) by Beijing-based artists Li Jianhong and VAVABOND. This 17-year project occupies the museum's ground floor not as a single piece, but as a scattered arrangement of real-time, site-responsive installations, interactive elements, soundtracks, and printed archives. Audio receivers capture electric signals from lift panels and the sounds of visitors interacting with everyday objects displayed on a table, and transmit these noises to speakers that generate an ever-evolving sonic backdrop. Environment Improvisation embodies the artists' democratic approach to sound: foregrounding the role of corporeal experience in shaping the sonic landscape while dismantling traditional hierarchies between artist, audience, and environment.
While walking through the three-floor exhibition with Sanderson, I am struck by a profound sense of nostalgia. Displays of cassettes and CDs, names of now-defunct underground venues that once hosted the country's most avantgarde music, and documentation of independent art spaces known for groundbreaking performances offer both a vital record of the past and a reminder of its disappearance. Having witnessed the ebbs and flows of Beijing's alternative spaces over the years, and now running my own venue during a period of relative stagnation in the scene, I recognise the urgency of documenting fleeting cultural moments, as this research-based exhibition has done.
By juxtaposing videos of performances such as improvised subway 'concerts' conducted in mainland China with those created in Hong Kong, the exhibition examines the nuanced yet interrelated social, economic, and political contexts that have nurtured diverse non-mainstream sound practices. Experimental music enjoys a longer documented history in Hong Kong, where the boom of independent labels goes back to the early 1990s, and benefited from artistic freedom and international connections, while mainland China's experimental scene mostly developed underground during the same period, constrained by governmental oversight of cultural industries.
In HY Kwan's FR(HK) (Field Recording Hong Kong) (2021–2022), originally released anonymously in both digital format and as a cassette designed to look like a mahjong tile, recordings of everyday soundscapes of Hong Kong—such as signals from radio stations, the Observatory telephone hotline, and a cycle path—resonate through the exhibition hall via speakers mounted on a stack of poles, creating an ambience that subtly bridges Hong Kong and Beijing.
Since relocating in 2018 to a new venue in Hong Kong's Foo Tak Building—a vertical artists' village with subsidised rents—Twenty Alpha has become one of the city's most vital experimental music venues. A corner of the museum's top-floor gallery is dedicated to a showcase of their event flyers, performance documentation, and publication project Eyewitnesses (2022)—an homage to John Cage's composition 4'33" (1952), comprising a box of 433 cards designed to generate sound performances when randomly selected and interpreted by participants.
Nearby is a section devoted to the practice of Yan Jun—a leading musician, critic, and writer who has organised underground, improvised 'music tours' of Beijing apartments since 2016. The display includes video documentation of his small-scale concerts, alongside an installation featuring a laser pointer reflected off the back of a CD onto the wall, highlighting the mirrored quality of the storage medium. The installation explores 'dakoudie' (cut CDs)—a fascinating cultural phenomenon in which damaged Western CDs, sent to China for recycling during the 1980s and 90s as part of the 'Reform and Opening Up' policy, which led to a surge in foreign materials entering the country, became unexpected cultural artefacts. Marked with small notches rendering them unplayable in full, the CDs were collected and resold within China, creating a unique perspective on global music and the Chinese audiences that enthusiastically engaged with them.
Another crucial layer of the exhibition narrative is the COVID-19 pandemic. When 'live houses' were shuttered between 2020 and 2021, many musicians voluntarily or reluctantly turned to streaming platforms. According to Sanderson, the experience was often unfulfilling and short-lived, as 'live streaming has real limitations in terms of interaction, and especially with improvised music, many performers crave being physically present with their audience'.
As independent spaces continue to disappear due to government policy and economic pressures, while cultural censorship reaches new extremes, It Always Sounds Somewhere underscores the resilience, solidarity, and vulnerability of independent sound practices—offering encouragement to practitioners within and beyond this scene. More than a historical record, it is an active attempt to preserve sonic memories and carve out new possibilities for sound to adapt to, antagonise, or transcend an increasingly constrained cultural landscape.