Yeung Yang, founder/executive director, Soundpocket, Hong Kong
Soundpocket is a promoter, educator, facilitator, and gatherer. We work in the fields of sound, art and culture. We find sound in diverse and dynamic relations with many different art forms (visual art, installation art, music, theatre, dance etc.), and with a variety of cultural contexts that give meanings to our lives. We would like to work with all those who share this active interest in sound.
soundpocket supports not just an art form, but ideas and possibilities that engage with aesthetically meaningful, culturally-grounded and publicly relevant sonic practices, which have a lot to teach about how we understand the world and the experiences yet to be valued.
http://www.soundpocket.org.hk
YY: We were founded in 2008. We are a company and then we became a charity. In name we have done two sound art festivals that's called Around. One artist said it's a good name because it's called Around Sound Art so it's not exactly sound art. And we don't really know what Sound Art is. But we try to do things around sound in art and sound as art. We hope sooner or later we'll be working with different people from different art forms who have an interest in sound – in listening really, not making sound, but their ears and listening.
We believe that it is possible to experience beauty, a very out-dated word these days, but I think it's still possible to experience beauty through listening. The festival we had done two times, but in the coming year we are thinking of stopping. Just to take stock and think a bit and think of the best way or strategy to nurture more artists with big ears. With sensitive ears. We don't have enough of those now.
From Sound Pocket's point of view, it is important for us to present works that are compelling in terms of listening. So it doesn't matter for instance if a work makes beautiful sounds or it attempts to make very new and strange sounds if in the it is not intended for the ears for listening. I guess in a certain way we are more interested in acoustics in a way and the relation between sound and space and sound and time. Sound and time in the sense that sound in lifetimes and in other scales of time.
We have also presented works that don't just use sound as just some kind of illustration of the materials in an installation for instance, it has to play a more determining role in the work as a whole. So it doesn't really matter if the person is a sound artist or whatever, we know artists who hate this term. Who don't want to be called sound artists, who want to be known as simply artists and we understand and we accept and agree to it.
We haven't been able to tell a lot of people about this, but maybe some. So this is something that we want to do more. In terms of documentation, I guess also writing about it like the book that we just did. Two things there, one is really just to make some marks. Discussion is really important, even just your feelings, it doesn't have to be very academic full of footnotes kind of essay. Even just a start of that kind of document. That kind of writing, leaving some marks, opens up conversations and also CDs. A way of fixing some live performances or something that happened into a form so that some people can get access to them, to expose their work to more audience.
I don't know who whoever are doing art will be interested to go into the sound part and learn more about their ears and sound as a material. I see some interest in theatre, sound designers, film people but not so much visual artists and installation artists. So I don't know who to support, but one of the things that we try to do is to bring really good artists, artists who know what they're doing sometimes, sometimes they don't it's fine. To bring them here so that there would be more intimate conversations between people who are in and people who are thinking whether they want to go in, so this has been happening on a very small and slow scale.
Sometimes we don't know whether we are interested in something. It's almost like we're casting a net to see who accidentally gets caught or something.
A lot of people have been coming and going. I mean not you but artists have been coming and of course going, and then people from here have been leaving, because maybe Hong Kong doesn't offer enough opportunities for presenting art and just career-wise. It's very lonely not in a depressing way. I'm just thinking about Boris Groys writing the _____ Project because as an organisation that lies on the periphery, just as any organisation, financially dependent on grants, you are always thinking about the future – the future that has not happened. I mean writing up a grant proposal, imagining this complete project that may never happen and doing it maybe two or three times a year, that's a very lonely process because you're always in this future kind of time frame.
It seems that suddenly that the government is buying so much into the creative industries kind of rhetoric, policy when perhaps a lot of other cities or countries have gone into it too much and so much that they want to stop or slow down. But Hong Kong just seems to be starting to realise that maybe that this concept would work somehow. And I don't understand the logic behind, but at least it seems there are grants available to the arts. We are a very small organisation and we have been encouraged by a something called Create Hong Kong, which is a big alignment of different government departments and there's this grant that any organisation claiming to be doing anything related to the creative industries can apply and they would give maximum grants, but it's much higher than what we would routinely get – the maximum amount from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. And there's also the MegaFund, which is...
So there seems to be more grants from the non-art public sector that is opening the door to the arts. So maybe in that sense cultural production is getting 'easier'. I mean if you do want to produce something in terms of a quantifiable kind of deliverable if that's what cultural production is then it's easier. But then there are more ways of doing it.
Our situation now, for the past two years now we have been doing programmes, curated programmes. Larger ones, festivals and smaller ones curated art programmes and then we have been doing small sort of educational programmes, workshop kind of stuff just to address some needs in the arts community. There are people in the art community who want to learn how to edit sound, they want to learn the softwares, they want to know the principles of recording, what kind of microphones they want to use when they want to record and if they can make their own microphones, these kinds of things to address needs in the art community. And we want to do more publications because of this documentation thing we want to have some kind of material base and with that we are planning to do more research. We have written some kind of research proposals, we want to identify the scope of sound art and the scope of active listeners and working in the arts in Hong Kong. And it's important as a kind of ground, for us as well just to know where we are going and where people are, to feel less lonely I guess. That's the point I suppose and the reason why we want to do that...
But the next step we thing that it's really important to first of all commission, to be financially better and to use that money to commission artists from here to do new and original works and this commissioning has to be like a research based, longer timeframe kind of commissioning. I guess especially for this sort of art form that is very new to Hong Kong. It doesn't have to be this kind of fixed, rigid kind of art form, it has to be identified, I mean so that people can question it. You have to identify a thing before you can start criticising it or debating about it.
And also to have professional team which can look up to some kind of career development, some kind of employment opportunities. This applies to artists, art administrators, researchers, curators of course. We don't have these opportunities, these paths are available that are accessible to whoever that are considering whether they want to go into the arts. Without a map it's very difficult to for a young person for them to decide that this is what they can do. Or to convince their parents that this is what they can do. And I guess this is a very Hong Kong thing. Young people still think they need to convince their parents when they choose a career or when they choose a major in university. So there's a lot to do.
I don't know if we were able to in five years grow into a space with at least maybe 5 or 6 full time staff. Then it would be great. We only have one now and I work here on the second shifts, sometimes full-time sometimes part-time, but I also have a full-time job so.. it'd be nice in five years we could have a team, then we can have a curatorial team, a research team and educational team. I feel our society has to slow down a bit in terms of cultural production / creative industries thing. If we don't, we lose a lot of thinking space. Sometimes I get scared.. We are just two years old and in the past one year, we have been approached by I mean for me, quite a lot of organisations, non-art related from Hong Kong, just to ask us if we might be interested to get involved in their projects, to contribute a programme, to curate something, to find artists. On the positive side you feel there is so much you can do, but then you start thinking if I want to satisfyll these requests then where do I find people? If I do want to satisfy these requests, do I end up pushing people who are not ready just to fill up a scene? And I think it's very dangerous, but how do you slow down? If you need to track record to get a grant? It's a big dilemma.
Listening is important for Hong Kong people because for Hong Kong people to be able to listen is to be able to live in the moment. If you go on a train like now you hear many many announcements, there will be TV continuously broadcasting news, you will hear people speaking on the phone, so it's a very very congested kind of urban listening environment.
And in the city there are so many high rises, they are so tall those buildings. The sound gets amplified, bounced back and forth. If we just stop and think and listen, we will realise how serious the problem of noise in the city is, so once we realise that we live again that moment.
It's also about heritage, preservation of our history. A few years ago in 2006 and 9 there was Star Ferry Clock incident where an almost 50 year old clock tower was demolished and the bells inside, it was a mechanical clock, it has an electronic mechanism or device, but then it is also made up of 5 bronze bells and these are really old bells and they sound really nice. Somehow the policy, the clock tower had to be demolished and now there is a new Star Ferry, there is a new clock tower and there are new bells powered by GPS system, digital clock and digital mechanism. The bells sound very different and it's an exile. The bells are now far out in the harbour and cut off from the community in Central, which is very different from the way the old clock tower was related to Edinburgh Square, City Hall and the Norman Foster Hong Kong Bank. Linking up the whole space of Central. Linking up the coastline, the tramways, the new buildings and the old landscape. So if we were a little bit more aware of how sounds actually give us a sense of community and a sense of togetherness, to be together in one place, living in one place then, we might be happier people.
We are in this place, To Kwa Wan. Sound Pocket is in To Kwa Wan and now we face East. And we're in a bay area and on the left is our old airport, Kai Tak Airport and on the right, luxury residential complex built by Mr. Lee Ka Shing. And then there's this dock in the bay for ships and ferries to come in for maintenance. Sometimes I would hear horns that sort of modest ones, not like the ones of big ocean miners. I know people have done fog horn compositions and songs and stuff like that. I haven't listened to them for real, and I'd love to listen to that. And part of what my very nice memories of the Hong Kong harbour is not visual, but when we used to have this ferry service between Jordan, which is a very busy part of Kowloon Peninsula and Central, Hong Kong Island. It's a very short ferry ride, maybe 10 minutes. But in spring the harbour would be all foggy and you really can't see what's around you. And there's this excitement, this sense of adventure, like you're ferry is moving, but you can't see anything, but then you hear the ferries say “hi” to each other with horns. Those are very nice memories. Now we don't have those ferry rides anymore. There's only just one, no but a few. Many are now gone. And I don't know why we are not seeing so much fog these days. I think that cutting off that visual, blurring the visual force us to come back to our ears and that's what inspires me most. I guess..
I actually recorded something myself or probably Anthony did, but I helped. I was holding the microphone of the wet market of the Central wet market. Just of the soundscape there and people pushing carts and people calling in Chinese the hawkers, the venders they would call out, ask you to come close and buy something and how much the 'choi sum' (Chinese vegetable) is today and how much the pumpkins are. The wet market again, is heritage preservation, which is going to be redeveloped and there will be a hotel and many stalls are gone now and some would be preserved, but others.. there's a whole street that would be renewed, to become a street of old shops but these are new old shops that pretend to be old or new shops that have old brands.
