Paul Wong's Be Like Sound installation immerses visitors at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden courtyard
Listen to Mahjong games, rustling bamboo, food preparation, Cantonese opera, and more as artwork launches
VANCOUVER CONTEMPORARY artist Paul Wong drew inspiration for the ancient Chinese Feng Shui system of the five elements—fire, earth, air, water and metal—to create his new sound installation in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden’s Hall of One Hundred Rivers courtyard.
Called Be Like Sound (BLS), the conceptual piece gets unveiled tonight (July 7) at the historic site. It was funded by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program.
BLS is a a six-channel work that immerses visitors in a variety of curated sounds, including sourced historical, sampled, remixed, and new audio recordings. Think celebrations, spoken languages, food preparation, Cantonese opera, canto-pop, the clattering of Mahjong games and the rustling of bamboo.
Designed to respond to the acoustics of the courtyard, it can be enjoyed in surround sound over 28 minutes.
Wong’s interdisciplinary and multimedia works sit in public collections including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Wong has a long relationship with both the Garden and Chinatown itself. His OCCUPYING CHINATOWN project was a year-long artist residency at the classical garden between March 2018 and March 2019; during that time he created a series of multidisciplinary artworks based on 700 letters in Chinese sent by 90 writers to his mother, Suk-Fong Wong. That led to the launch in 2021 of the limited-edition art book OCCUPYING CHINATOWN, which blended personal essays on Chinese-Canadian identity with his major artworks and full-colour photographs.
The unveiling tonight from 5 to 8 pm is a free event. The installation will then be available to all visitors of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.
Related Articles
