Vin Gallery is pleased to present artist Liang Yujue’s debut solo exhibition, Let’s shape the sound of the future together, which also marks the gallery's first collaboration with a Chinese artist at its Shanghai venue. The title of the exhibition cites the manifesto of a sound engineer from the new energy vehicle (NEV) industry and materializes within the artist’s installation as an iterative inquiry laden with metaphor.
The exhibition segues from the street to a contemporary art context and space through a set of accessibility infrastructures, inviting the viewer to reconfigure their hierarchy of sensory perception. This switch directs attention to the evolving intent behind the Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System (AVAS) in NEVs—a transition from globally mandated warning signals toward market-driven branding imperatives. The eponymous series of copperplate etchings exposes the future urban soundscape and emerging cognitive orders manufactured by NEV propaganda. Thus, auditory experience shapes, while the visual recedes into absence.
As the virtual avatar of a sound engineer details on vintage CRT monitors how they combat the chaos of the cityscape and briefly discipline entropic noise and cacophony through regular 1–2 second looping sound waves, sound sculpts identity and even reshapes and subverts cognition through the indulgence in the dromocratic driving experience and premium ambisonics services. Inspired by BMW’s Erlkönig prototype cars and related advertising strategy, the woodcut slogan “Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear?” (taken from Der Erlkönig by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Edgar Alfred Bowring’s translation) points to the violence and peril underneath the veneer of euphoria, like a whisper from a demon lord. The inflated airbags, rendered in layers of colorful paints, resemble blossoming flowers. The semiotic schemas draw people into the oblivion of machinery and flesh, redirecting focus to the physiological traces of the real connection between object and body.
Liang Yujue's artistic practice relies on sound to reveal and on visuality to conceal. Whether it is the mirroring between old TVs and digital screens, the echoing of vinyl grooves and digitized encoded waveforms, or the juxtaposition of so-called “new” energy vehicles with a background that is in fact older than the development of fuel-powered cars... These retro-futurist simulacra cast “us” into the shadows of hyper-reality. Perhaps the notions of “co-creation” and “future” are just collective illusions encoded in capital. The present is the future, and the present is the past.
Curator：成希月 Kira Xiyue Cheng
