Foreword

Founded in 1982, the Centre National de Création Musicale, Lyon (GRAME) is devoted to promoting musical creation and the performance and exhibition of art. It concentrates on the cross-disciplinary fusion of different art forms and the study of avant-garde music, offering residencies to outstanding sound artists from around the world and encouraging them to release new works.

In June 2010 Taipei Fine Arts Museum and GRAME joined forces for the first time, resenting “Mobility, Sound and Form,” a cross-disciplinary synthesis of music, spatial installation, dance and multiple art forms grounded in digital technology and showcasing the many faces of sound. Again in 2013 we jointly organized the exhibition “Imminent Sounds: Falls and Crossings” presenting the depth and infinite possibilities of music and art through symbols and metaphors of the cycle of life. Now in 2019 we collaborate for the third time, on “Musica Mobile: A Poetics of Sound and Movement,” curated by GRAME founder and independent curator James Giroudon. The sound engineer and electronic music designer Christophe Lebreton serves as technical director. The exhibition brings together over 20 contemporary artists from Taiwan and abroad, unveiling more than 10 works of sound art and sound installation, exploring how movement evolves and passes through time and space, and demonstrating new possibilities for contemporary art.

Movement has long been an element at the heart of modern and contemporary art since the early 20th century. Marcel Duchamp depicted a succession of motions in a single painting, Nude Descending a Staircase. The Italian Futurists glorified speed and the constant motion of industrialized society. Kinetic art, followed by optical art, made mobility and visual illusions their primary forms of artistic expression... For the past century, art has focused on mobility and movement, and the concept of motion serves as a bridge between sound and vision. Since the invention of the internet, the state of “mobility/ movement” has become ever more paradoxical and complex. In today's digitalized society, mobility has gone beyond the physical motion of individuals and has shifted to the level of the virtual and imaginary. Whether physical or virtual, this alteration in the nature of movement has endowed space and speed with completely different meanings; it has deeply engraved itself on our digital lives, making everything more rapid and unreal. Through the exhibition “Musica Mobile,” viewers can not only see how contemporary art expresses the physical interaction of music, space, and light and shadow through the interweaving dialogue of sound and silence, but through the movement of their own bodies, they can also glimpse the reverberation of and response to motion in today's world.

This exhibition features artworks created with comparatively new or completely new technology and uses cross-platform, experimental audiovisual installations that allow the rational logic of technology and the sense of beauty and philosophical rumination of the humanities to blend perfectly together, to complement and complete each other. The successful unveiling of this exhibition is due to the support and help of many people from different walks of life. We are especially thankful to the French Ministry of Culture, the Lyon City Government, the French Office in Taipei, and Wallonie-Bruxelles International for their generous sponsorship and assistance. Likewise, we are grateful to all the artists for their wholesale commitment and creativity, and to the specialist teams from both France and Taiwan for their dedication and diligence. Their collective effort has enabled the fruition of this marvelous exhibition that encompasses vision, hearing and touch. By capturing fragments of sound, “Musica Mobile”attempts to create a vast yet private landscape. We invite you to personally enter this terrain of sound images, to join us in listening to their contours and experiencing their shapes and the spacetimes they inhabit.

Ping Lin

Director, Taipei Fine Arts Museum