Ruptured Rhetoric: Constructing London Sinophone Communities through Sound

Created by Hong Kong-born, London-based artist and University of the Arts London lecturer Bo Choy, War Perception (感知戰爭) is a multilayered narrative film essay. The work, shot in Hong Kong in 2019, was produced and first exhibited in London in 2020. War Perception has been shown at London’s Tabula Rasa Gallery, and it was selected to show at the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021 exhibition as the early-career artist’s project exemplifying “the resilience of the creative process in a challenging year.” Within the work, the artist herself dresses up as a shaman-like memorial priest. In a white Taoist robe, she carries a couple of mirrors on her back and holds a wooden sword as she roams Hong Kong streets filled with an atmosphere of protest and a chilling post-protest vibe (Figure 1). In our interview,¹⁴ Bo Choy said that she designed the costume herself, and that the clothing was made in London. Though she drew the inspiration for the costume design from the religious memorial clothing of the generation in south Guangdong and Hong Kong, she hoped to cooperate with London’s local Chinese diasporic culture to keep her distance from the actual Hong Kong. For this reason, she chose to make the entire costume in London using local materials.

The whole film is an improvisation—Bo Choy wanders around various corners of Hong Kong like a ghost, maintaining a certain distance from the society, to observe the behavior of people and to do her own ritual work. The music in the film is minimalist in style and looms in the background of the film. Multiple layers of sound intertwine in the film. The looming background accompanies such surreal and eerie scenes as her shaman-like and priestly ritual walk, as well as realistic scenes from the artist’s own daily life, such as random conversations between Bo Choy and her mother and protest scenes in Hong Kong’s Central Plaza. At the same time, the artist narrates the film in her own voice, speaking Cantonese. In tandem with the main narrative about the protest scene and the intervening daily dialogue scenes, the film depicts two masked people who appear in ordinary residential areas in Hong Kong. These two people, as indicated by the artist during our interview, represent Margaret Thatcher and Mao Zedong.

According to Eleni Ikoniadou, in the sonic space, “affect complicates the question of subjectivity and challenges the assumption that there are already-formed subjects, identities, and essences in the world.”¹⁵ In other words, sound can generate a multiplicity of affects that help to dismantle the dominant linear narrative and cultural particularity (e.g., China-centrism). The occasional noise in minimalist music, sound, or film essentially becomes a representation or embodiment of complex identities and political struggles. In the narration of the film, the artist’s opening description of night and day sets the tone of this work: using the white mirror on her body to record the hustle and bustle of the city (Hong Kong), she pays homage to the aftermath of the “war” (the protest of 2019), finding the truth in a society riddled with lies. There are some scenes in the film that cannot be shown in China. Two examples are the Lennon Wall (联农墙) covered with fierce protest texts and the teenagers performing masked street dances on the day of the Anti-Ban Mask Law Parade—one shows a scene of the life of the citizens where nothing seems to happen, and the other shows a scene full of tension and a bit of playfulness. Bo Choy admitted that she was in a state of improvisation during the entire creation process and was expressing a state of mind that commemorates the soul of the city. Though the city of Hong Kong is its center, the work has had no opportunity to be screened in Hong Kong or mainland China.

This has caused mixed feelings to arise in the artist, like the spread of fear and depression in the atmosphere created by the music and sound within the film. War is obviously a metaphor in this film, each of its various layers of war happening in a different spatiotemporal context: (1) the ideological war, (2) the war on the street, and (3) the war between two colonial powers—the new and the old. With intent, the artist constructs a rhythmic activism using a complicated time–space structure comprising narrating statement, sound, and music, with Cantonese narrative and voices in conversation that are contingent, fragmented, and metaphysical. The elements of protest within the music are not direct but subliminal, lying underneath the whole audiovisual spectacle. The artist also maintains a distance between her Hong Kong, an imagined city grounded in her London context, and the actual or literal city of Hong Kong.

Bo Choy offered the following thoughts in reference to music-making in the film: “I just simply use 12 notes to make music through my phone and then use my computer to record the music from my phone. I composed the music even before I shot the film.” The music in the video is very minimalist—like helpless whispering. But what is more interesting is the sound in the scenes of daily life: the conversation in the family, the noise on the street, the Chinese national anthem “March of the Volunteers” (《义勇军进行曲》) playing on the TV at home, and the new mainland Chinese immigrants’ dancing songs on the square. The latter accompaniment music, played by middle-aged men and women performing square dances, has become an important part of the soundwork in the construction of images. This sonic disruption has political power to intervene in the preexisting soundscape, and I think of it as a kind of patriotic sonic disruption arousing in the people of Hong Kong an affective connection to the Chinese nation. In our interview, the artist said that before she left Hong Kong as a teenager, even after the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, she had never had the experience of hearing the Chinese national anthem on TV. “This should have happened after 2015,” Bo Choy said. “And I find my mother was clearly used to it.” In other words, this propaganda soundscape seems to have been constructed in a short time rather recently in order to shape the identity, and thus the subjectivity, of Hong Kong’s citizens. Therefore, in the narration of the film, the artist is always asking questions, paying homage, and debating within herself, always accompanied by faint music and a noisy ambient soundscape, exploring a potential upcoming political aesthetic.

The sporadic sounds of everyday life intrude intermittently into the minimal underlying music’s linearity. The sounding affect of the daily music was a curiosity to Bo Choy, but her mother had seemingly gotten used to it. This led me to ask another question drawing upon the artist’s memory: “Was there any political worshiping music [that is, reverential toward the state as a political entity, like the Chinese national anthem] on the media before Hong Kong was handed over to China?” “No,” she responded, “the British role was very apolitical. They only promoted economic things as their potential way of [creating or executing] a kind of propaganda. We only knew Hong Kong was a small place and the land of Hong Kong was very expensive.” It seems obvious that the new authoritarian regime intended to create a new political sonic ecology that would gradually replace the previous order. Bo Choy has tried to capture that ecology and reconstruct its rhythm of sonic objects in her film essay, thereby unveiling the relationship between Hong Kong’s people and the soundworks. As Ikoniadou said, “Humans do not make rhythm; at best, they merely follow and comply with contingency of the materials themselves.”¹⁶

Art historian Dhanveer Singh Brar provides a helpful explanation of music and media theorist Steve Goodman’s articulation of the sound and affect of Black electronic dance music. According to Brar, Goodman “requires us [to] not overly aestheticize the soundscape of black electronic dance music.”¹⁷ I believe that the work of the four artists I intend to explore is similarly wrapped in an aesthetic shell of poetic and veiled political activism. In Bo Choy’s work, multiple-layer affect stimulates the audience’s affections, and the assemblage of sound-induced affect constructs a de-Sinicised Sinophone atmosphere. This film’s contingent sound has created a forceful break in the epistemological basis of Sinophone diaspora music.

Bo Choy attempts to create a mix of sophisticated affect and emotions through the assemblage of sound in the film, in order to achieve a kind of reflection and introspection that allow one to understand and move beyond the politicized singular Chineseness faced by a Hong Kong now occupied by the mainland. In a sense, life in this Hong Kong corresponds to life in the Sinophone context in London, and this work, exhibited in London’s Tabula Rasa Gallery¹⁸ and other art spaces, has created a spatial atmosphere that allows viewers far from China’s political ecology to experience this correspondence. London’s Sinophone community, like the community of Hong Kong, seeks to resist the PRC’s control, and this work explores the (London Sinophone) community’s own way to free itself from the monolithic “Chineseness” narrative rendered by the PRC government. As the artist said: “The soundscape of Hong Kong is a little strange to me, but this strangeness also makes me feel the paradoxical between different political groups, and my work is to mix these contradictory voices through the making of sound and moving image. I present what I personally observe about the political realities of Hong Kong, expressed in my artistic language, in London’s art scene.”

Bo Choy’s work focuses on the soundscape and visual scenes that Hong Kong experienced and left behind during and after the anti-extradition movement in 2019. The artist’s reflections on the shaping of Hong Kong’s politics and ideology manipulated by both old (British) and new (PRC) colonialism also prompted the analysis of this study to move to another London-based Hong Kong artist, Yarli Allison.

Yarli Allison is a Canadian-born Hong Kong ethnic artist. Currently based in London, she focuses on making queer-related video art (that is, video art related to sexual or gender identities outside traditional or established norms) combined with digital technological experimentation (and thus outside traditional or established norms of video production and presentation). Her work In 1875 We Met at the Docks of Liverpool (1875 於梨花埠遇上), commissioned by the FACT cinema,¹⁹ Liverpool, is a multimedia sonic installation built using two channels of 4 K video with audio, and a composite of eight screens (Figure 2).

Focusing on the oldest Chinatown in Europe, Liverpool’s Pitt Street, Yarli researched several descendants of these Chinese and blended English voices reading their documents into the soundscape used to craft this work’s sonic realm. The early Chinese were mostly exploited by local agents who transported them to the UK as coolies (the term then used for unskilled Asian labor, now widely deemed offensive) from such Chinese ports as Hong Kong and Guangdong. Thus, brought to the UK to do manual labor much like slaves, they experienced physical and mental torture and suffering during that time. According to the artist’s introduction, she is seeking a way of “healing grief” by using a technology she has termed “pixel VR return, through the use of virtual reality technology.” Yarli has presented yet obfuscated an experience that is both real and illusory. As already mentioned, Yarli’s form of artistic construction in this work includes using eight screens to present the story’s narration. The content of the narration feels hallucinated, comprising mixed and fragmented spoken voices in both Cantonese and English. The languages and voices alternate to construct a temporal overlap, combining the self-narration of the coolies’ history with the recollections of later generations. The historical context of the story is that after the abolition of slavery, British imperialism needed other means to continue its industrial advance. As the descendants of these Chinese laborers begin to recall, the video footage shows an abstract interior scene of Liverpool’s Chinatown rendered in animation. When the narrator is speaking, their voices create a rhythm that corresponds with the gradually sounding music composed by the UK-based Hong Kong musician Edy Fung (Quantum Foam).

In her work, Yarli tries to make the spatiotemporal context into a nonlinear entity nourished by the obfuscated experience within the fractured storytelling narratives, which are blended in and emerging from the dream-like immersive multimedia soundscape. The historical and political vibrations of 2019 have stirred more Hong Kong artists to pay closer attention to such terminology as “postcolonialism,” “diaspora,” and “Sinophone.” Among these terms, Hong Kongers have complicated feelings toward “postcolonialism.” After the modern social structure, constructed under the original colonial system, broke down following 2019, the feelings of dissatisfaction and resistance in the city continued to spread and were replaced by a new nationalism and patriotism. This new nationalism and patriotism became encapsulated in (or captured by) a single, dominant China-centric rhetoric from the mainland and that narrative’s particularity. This, in turn, made the people of Hong Kong newly sensitive toward and concerned with the meaning of “colonialism.”

“The reasons for the diaspora are different in every era,” Yarli stated in our interview.²⁰ This work uses vivid animation and VR technology to create a kind of detachment from reality, by depicting the first generation of various historical events. The tragic experiences of Chinese immigrants, the temporally intertwined present-day images of Chinatown, and narrative voices recalling events in interviews construct a phenomenological sound space in which the role of sound is to break down a dualistic attitude toward colonialism. After 2019, how should Hong Kongers look at this question? Yarli does not give us an answer. Instead, she lets the critical core of an answer take shape through the complex affect and multilayered sound construction of her work. And, because the visual effect of that work so clearly makes one sense the impact of centralization, the audience may often overlook the importance of sound in this piece.

The work’s narration blends Cantonese and English. The voice in Cantonese is the artist’s imaginary exhortation to find workers at the Hong Kong wharf and to recruit laborers, while the English voices present the recollections of the British descendants of these Chinese laborers. During Yarli’s study for this work, some texts of the Chinese laborers’ descendants were excavated and voiced into the soundwork of the art. The music in the background, with its minimal electronic style, is mixed with the cracking sound of the ship’s deck, the working sound of the boiler room, and the blended English and Cantonese self-narrative voices. The artist presents the harsh working environment of the boiler room in the form of the moving graphics of visual reality. In the last part of the film, accompanied by music, a series of Cantonese protest sounds echo. “Equal pay for equal work,” the echoes say, offering a kind of resistance, reflecting the fact that the ethnic Chinese were facing unequal treatment at that time.

The sonic atmosphere contributes to making the sound realm, for, as the musicologist Friedlind Riedel stated in Music as Atmosphere, “the sonic holds some kind of affective power to penetrate situations, collectives and selves, and manifests as environmental atmosphere among them.”²¹ Yarli has tried to create this affective power in making her work, seeking to generate the critical dimension from the soundscape. These are the contents of the artist’s imagination. As you are in the process of watching the movie, you experience the two interactive channels constructed by the eight screens, combined with the scene built with the visual materials excavated by the artist, constructing an environment that makes you (the audience, the listener) resonate with the sound and emerge into an atmospheric terrain conducive to reflection on, and to contemplation of, Yarli’s storytelling.

Chris Zhongtian Yuan is a London-based artist. Originally from Wuhan in mainland China, they were educated in architecture in the US and the UK. During the pandemic, as it became difficult to get back into China, they stayed in the UK. While there, they made their two video artworks—Wuhan Punk (武汉朋克) in 2020 and Close, Closer (亲近，更近) in 2021.

Wuhan Punk is Yuan’s personal musical memory of Wuhan’s elapsed punk scene; Wuhan is generally considered one of the most important punk-rock cities in China.²² The work Wuhan Punk, which tells the history of the rise and fall of punk in Wuhan, was wholly created using digital animation. In our interview, Yuan admitted that they won’t use the same method if they’re able to return to China and recreate the work: “If I can go back to China, I may do more grounded fieldwork to compose this video art, but now I can only make it in a cyber environment through my memory, imagination, and technology. My creation of this work may also be related to the fact that I have not been able to return to China for too long, and [so] I began to imagine my hometown.”²³ So the visual aspect of the whole work takes the form of digital animation. Meanwhile, the work’s auditory aspect is a complex, multilayered soundscape spread throughout the video. This soundscape includes a background soundtrack of electronic music, scattered clips of punk music, the artist’s Wuhan-dialectic storytelling narration, interspersed radio broadcasts, and additional fragmented sounds. The parts of the work depicting plain reality (the reality that punk has faded away in Wuhan) produce pessimism, but this is contrasted with an alternative construction of a nostalgic atmosphere, the depiction of Yuan’s childhood experience of listening to punk. The kernel of this work describes how—in the midst of development, urban regeneration, and a changing political climate—punk culture and bands have gradually disappeared in Wuhan. But living in London has stimulated Yuan’s memory of an earlier time: “I was used to the sound of punk, back when I was a child. I lived in the Hubei Academy of Fine Art then, and we celebrated spring festival by attending the punk gigs.” The work ends with a pixelated, blurry performance video of the Wuhan punk band SMZB, from a broadcast of the band’s gig at the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts that the artist watched when they were a child. Yuan described the environment to me: “Wuhan was like a huge construction site; construction was being carried out everywhere; and [everything] there was surrounded by industrial sound. This is probably why Wuhan became a punk city.”

Amid rapid economic development and repression by government censors, punk bands in Wuhan have become more and more marginalized, gradually becoming able to perform only in the city’s underground, or disappearing entirely. “Maybe the band members have matured and gradually lost interest in punk music,” Yuan speculated in our interview. “Or maybe it’s something else, other reasons.” Overall, there is not much obvious political resistance in this work. But the sound of Yuan’s Wuhan-dialectic narration, the industrial sounds, the sound of socialist propaganda on the radio, and the sound of punk music are intertwined in the work to create a surreal and hauntological atmosphere. I think what this work highlights are the anachronism of the punk spirit (seen in Yuan’s nostalgic recollection) and the disappearance of the “punk utopia” in the context of contemporary China’s culture and politics. Through this work, Yuan mourns the vanishing of a kind of sound in urban life, the top-down economic reconstruction of Wuhan having made the city’s cultural life mediocre and the prior urban autonomy dissipated.

Close, Closer is a time-travel video artwork created between 2020 and 2021. The creation of this work was inspired by Yuan’s reflection on their relationship with their mother. The artist’s mother, a painter, once undertook an ethnographic tour to Lugu Lake in Yunnan Province in 1993, and she created a series of artworks there to depict the life and scenery of aboriginal people (Mosuo) (Figure 3).

Unpleasant online chats with their mother related to gender identity stimulated Yuan to recall and reimagine their mother’s Lugu Lake trip more than 20 years before. According to Yuan, the chat, a long-distance communication during a COVID-related lockdown, concerned their queer identity and had led to misunderstanding and tension. Their mother expressed worries and a lack of acceptance when Yuan discussed their queer identity with her. The unexpected conflict confused Yuan, as they believed there was a cooperative relationship between feminist and queer groups: “Why can’t my mother, a feminist artist, accept my queer identity?” The conflict within the intimate parent–child relationship also caught Yuan off guard; they were taken back by the unaccepting tone.

Yuan couldn’t physically go back to China to stay with their mother because of the pandemic; so they tried to deal with the conflict by engaging with their mother through their own imagination. The connection they saw between the queer and feminist communities stirred their imagined memory of their mother’s trip to Lugu Lake when she was young. They got caught up in their mother’s memory of collecting scenery at Lugu Lake, and they connected a series of collaged visual memories with a soundscape. The Mosuo people live around Lugu Lake, and their unique “walking marriage” system has caused them to be marginalized by the PRC government’s ethnic policies, as well as by the so-called settler colonialism triggered by a series of political crackdowns in Yunnan Province during the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. These collaged imagined memories are represented visually and sonically using Mosuo songs, military percussion sounds, and the sounds of propaganda broadcast media, forming an immersive sonic environment throughout this artwork. In a talk with the art historian Sophie Guo,²⁴ Yuan, speaking of their motivation for making this artwork, stated:

The geopolitical marginality of Lugu Lake in China seems to be inextricably linked to the artist’s personal perception of gender. This work is also mainly produced by digital animation technology with a few fragmented film clips of Mosuo people to create a sense of space like that found in what Sophie Guo has called a “paper peepshow.”²⁵ The elements of sound in the work are very diverse. They include the sounds of drum rhythm, water droplets, Yunnan folk songs, and Mandarin propaganda “ethnic minority scenic spots.”²⁶ Taken together, they form a kind of exotic soundscape collage.

Yuan made this work in several layers, and each layer can be embodied in different sounds. The surface layer is the artist recalling his mother’s trip in 1993. These memories are not the real memory of the artist themselves, but rather a series of imagined scenes. They use a lot of their mother’s paintings and photographs as construction elements in this work. The second layer is the reflection on colonialism (settler colonialism), which is represented through the sounds of construction sites, aboriginal singing, drums, and so on—sounds that point to the impact of industrialized tourism on the aboriginal life of the locals, and that embody the artist’s articulation of (neo)colonialism. The Mosuo people are an ethnic minority group with a distinct matrilineal “walking marriage” system (走婚制),²⁷ and the music they sing is considered part of the walking marriage communication and ceremony. Their traditional way of life has clearly become a part of the commodification typical of industrialized tourism, and at this layer the artist draws attention to the distinction between the Chinese government’s policy on the governance of ethnic minorities and its actual impact on the Mosuo way of life. The third layer is very obscure; but, based on what the artist indicated in the interview, it has to do with their thinking about gender issues, from which the motivation for the creation of the entire work stems. In describing the work on their own website, Chris Yuan writes the following:

China’s minority governance policies are often ambiguous in their external presentation and internal strategies, and Yuan seems to have used this ambiguity to draw a link between their mother as an artist and the marginality and fluidity of their own gender identity. The multi-level thinking of Yuan’s art fuses historical, ethnic, and gender-related entanglements through sound.

Hong Kong–born, London-based sound artist On Yee Lo’s Cooking Instruments is a work of performance art that exhibits a self-organized cooking process as a symbolic demonstration. In the performance, she creates a tense, urgent, and humorous atmosphere through the sound of the collision between kitchen utensils and percussion instruments. The cooking process is orderly, but the sound of the kitchen utensils is impromptu.

I attended Lo’s performance in 2021 at Café Oto (Figure 4), a famous venue specializing in experimental and free jazz in London. She showed the audience how to make chang fen (rice noodle roll 肠粉), a delicacy of the southern region of China, mainly Guangdong, Guangxi, and Hong Kong. The whole performance was arranged linearly in the following order. Before cooking, Lo sang two karaoke songs from Hong Kong rock band Tat Ming Pair (達明一派), banned by the Chinese government for its political stand after 2019. She then sang another song, “Glory of Hong Kong” (《願榮光歸香港》), which is considered the anthem of Hong Kong’s 2019 protest²⁹ and has also been completely banned. Following the karaoke, the artist undertook her task using a preselected set of cooking instruments. She set up two gongs (锣)—one to her left and one behind her on the right. While cooking, she hit the gongs to make occasional sounds, saying it could help her to concentrate on her work. In order to ensure the food could be accepted by most of the audience in London, she added only some red onion to the chang fen as filling. When she shared the food with her audience, it was like she was constructing a community upon completing the cooking, eventually helping the tense atmosphere created during the cooking process to relax. During our interview, Lo said that the motivation to make this series of performances was the memory of her mother’s cooking of dou hua (豆花). She still remembers the order, busyness, and organization of her mother’s cooking.³⁰

Chee Wah Kuan, who identifies the food as an anti-China-centrist symbol in Sinophone Malaysian films, believes that food is an important cultural marker for constructing the diversity of Sinophone-related identities.³¹ During this cooking demonstration, there is the sound of kitchen utensils colliding and the sound of gongs being hit. As already mentioned, Lo hits the gongs as a part of the cooking process, the mixed sounds of gongs and kitchen utensils creating a unique atmosphere. The symbolism of the artist’s creation of food embodies the energies of dissatisfaction, excitement, helplessness, and nostalgia in the immersive sound atmosphere constructed by the intense sound making. To one in attendance, it feels like these energies gathered by the artist herself are diffused to the audience community through the collision of sound as she makes the food.

Food here is the cultural symbol that can best express the discursive identity of the artist. For the anthropologist David Sutton, in terms of diaspora, cooking embodies “an attempt to synesthetically reconstruct and remember, to return to that whole world of home, which is subjectively experienced both locally and nationally.”³² Lo transforms the sense of cooking into hearing and reconstructs a multidimensional sensory experience by forming the atmosphere.

The whole food-making process has evolved into a nostalgic experience, whether food is a symbol of the happy past³³ or an expression of resistance inherent in dissatisfaction with reality. Cooking becomes a process of performative rectification, overcoming colonialism through resistance and appropriation, and becoming a way to gather power. Cooking this kind of food from Hong Kong and Guangdong in the environment of London also brought in the local Chinese cultural attributes of London’s Sinophone community: Lo said she couldn’t place the traditional char siew (Cantonese barbecued pork) inside the chang feng because that would not suit local tastes. The whole performance also made me feel that the artist caused the audience to resonate with her emotions through the soundwork, rather than through the food itself, because of the Sinophone atmosphere created through the cooking sound.

London’s new Chinese ethnic diaspora groups are merging and forming a community. Curation, exhibition, and other art-related activities are the social and political processes building the new Sinophone community. At the end of 2021, Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s and Bo Choy’s works were exhibited at Tabula Rasa Gallery in London, along with other artists’ works, all of which were related to the Sinophone community’s political and postcolonial concerns, with the shared exhibition theme I could not recall how I got here. The show attracted many diaspora Chinese ethnicities, new immigrants from Hong Kong, and London-area locals with diverse backgrounds, giving all the opportunity to interact as a community. Yarli Allison’s work also was exhibited in the Liverpool FACT cinema under the title Future Ages Will Wonder. This exhibition was curated by Annie Jael Kwan, who came from Hong Kong, as part of the FACT cinema’s Radical Ancestry project, which focuses on exploring the sense of belonging.

In these art and sound-art exhibitions, Chinese ethnic artists from different geopolitical backgrounds (Hong Kong and the PRC) began to show their desire for solidarity and to discover the emotions and attitudes they held in common, their shared opposition to the totalitarian power of the China-centric rhetoric and unitary concept of “Chineseness.” These communities are, at present, both centralized and dispersed. On the one hand, people may gather in some central location for artistic activism and events; on the other hand, these artists are scattered across London and the UK, running their own careers and using their creations to influence the small communities they have built.

The five artworks discussed in this essay are components that form the new London Sinophone community through sound. This forming through affect and sonic effects is achieved using three kinds of sound: dialect sounds, hauntology sounds, and fragmented sound intrusions. A common sensibility simultaneously shared among three of the five works (all but Close, Closer and Cooking Instruments) is that the artists speak their own dialects to breach the impediment posed by the power of Mandarin. In Wuhan Punk, Chris Yuan speaks a Wuhan dialect to narrate the developmental conditions important to this punk rock history. Similarly, in War Perception and We Met At the Docks of Liverpool, the artists use Cantonese as the main language to narrate their storylines. The promotion of standard Mandarin has always been an important ideological tool for advancing the CCP government’s institution of power through its construction of Chinese nationalism.³⁴ This seems to make dialects other than Mandarin essential tools in the struggle to maintain individual agency, enabling resistance against the standardization of Mandarin. In these works, the sound of Mandarin can only be vaguely and occasionally heard—in Wuhan Punk there is a short piece of Mandarin heard in a broadcast reporting news about the floods in Wuhan, and in War Perception the national anthem is sung in Mandarin in the artist’s daily life scene, where it serves as an acoustic metaphor illustrating how the state is forging a nationalist soundscape to influence the sonic agency of the Hong Kong public. But these sounds do not occupy a dominant position in these works; instead, they serve as a background that reflects the pervasive influence of mainstream Chineseness and the official construction of the public’s subjectivity through the impetus of sound’s power. Therefore, through the dialect sounds that appear in them, these works join together in their separation and alienation from the mainstream language power, forming part of the poetic resistance.

The hauntological atmosphere is also arguably spread among the five pieces, making it an important formative influence on the shared sensibility of the works’ common affective sphere. From Bo Choy’s shaman-like, ghostly walking on the “postwar” streets of Hong Kong, to Yarli’s reimagination and digital simulation of Chinese-ethnic seamen’s life on Liverpool’s Pitt Street, to Chris Yuan’s fragmented and restorative recollection of Wuhan punk and their mother’s voyage to Lugu Lake 20 years ago, to On Yee Lo’s alienating atmosphere of the food-making process on an experimental music stage—in all these hauntological scenes, sounds play an important role as scene components. The theorization of hauntology as it relates to soundwork can be traced to Mark Fisher’s articulation of hauntology as that which is “sounded ‘ghostly.’”³⁵ Diffused in the five artworks, these ghost sounds work together with the pieces’ moving graphics to create scenes of loss, repression, and alienation—scenes embodied as the spiritual sound of cooking instruments, the diminished sound of punk rock music, the protesting sound of Hong Kong residents from a shaman’s perspective, and the howling sound of the lost ethnic Chinese seamen and laborers.

Mark Fisher believes that 21st-century electronic music yields to the past and retrospection in much the same way that most 2000s electronic music was taken from 1990s samples, in a phenomenon that Fisher describes as “hauntology as desperate thoughts about the future.” Of that phenomenon in 2000s electronic music he writes, “What defined this ‘hauntological’ confluence more than anything else was its confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future.”³⁶ Thus, in Fisher’s view, a lost future stimulates the turn to hauntology. Consistent with this perspective, I argue that hauntological sound plays an important role in establishing the Sinophone atmosphere, and that what stimulates artists’ turn to this hauntology is an impinging future that seems hopeless but that is a future they intend to endure, continuing on into it, thinking and creating in a suitably dark tone.

The sense of powerlessness about the future revealed in these works through the aesthetic feature of hauntology does not derive wholly from the community’s region of origin and its members’ experiences there; it also reflects the weak influence of the establishment of the London/UK Sinophone community, especially in the case of today’s dynamic perception of Chineseness under the influence of capitalist globalization and postcoloniality. With its rising political and economic power, mainland China (the PRC) has tended to impose a homogenized concept of Chineseness, and homogenized policies, on every place and ethnic group over which it can exert its dominant political power. The emerging London Sinophone community, formed by members of the recent Chinese ethnic diaspora, is striving to cope with the epistemology of Chineseness as resistance activism. Concerning such activism, Howard Chiang writes of the “power of the ‘local’ in resisting what I called the singular Chineseness globalization, underestimating the epistemic homogenizing power of globalization itself.”³⁷

To conjure the aura of an acoustic sphere distinct from the dominant ideological soundscape promoted by the mainland Chinese government, the London Sinophone community must make use of encompassing soundworks. These soundworks not only embody the London Sinophone community’s diverse Chinese ethnic identities but also establish a sense of locality within this community. As mentioned earlier, the community is built on a foundation of localization, Chinese ethnic artists having become long-term residents of London due to ideological confrontations at home and the PRC government’s strict pandemic policies. Through their artworks, they construct new identities and resist authoritarian oppression, setting up new communities and local power to establish a viable and reasonable system for the London Sinophone.

The construction of this local power mechanism includes an epistemological conceptualization of the complex meanings of colonialism, intensive self-reflection and debate over queer identities (contemplating perspectives on gender in the Chinese community in response to, and influenced by, local gender politics in the UK), the localization of the social aspects of Chinese food culture, and additional phenomena already discussed. This has created a hybridized London Sinophone discourse, which stands at the edge of the Chinese cultural circle, examining and reflecting on mainstream Chinese culture to some extent while partially resisting it in order to maintain the London Sinophone’s independence.

In terms of the temporality of sound, these five works are presented in flashbacks or fragments. This manner of presentation highlights how the public-sphere consciousness perceives that there is both no present and no aim toward the future. If there is no aim toward the future, there is no future. Paradoxically, these artworks are making the future of “no future” in their sonic realm.

Sound can be employed as both a foundational structural element and a speculative compass for stimulating debate concerning social and political conflict.³⁸ The political and personal crises triggered by the current political circumstance are reflected in the sounding practices of the five pieces by four Chinese ethnic artists, which can be understood in terms of the desire to refine an agency to fit the new political and territorial conditions. According to Brandon LaBelle:

The works are exploring, as well as engaging in, the contemporary struggle to construct the Sinophone community through specific sonic and graphic practices. In the context of this struggle, these practices are a form of micro-resistance activism opposing the hegemonic political power. Assimilating local (UK) cultural and political elements, they create what Shu-Mei Shih has called “geopolitical situatedness” and a “place based practice”;⁴⁰ that is, the London Sinophone. The soundworks, then, are about the sonic agency of these arts. The soundscapes infused with sonic agency resist the singular “Chineseness” discourse through their community-constructing activity using various sound elements and systems of affection. When these works are exhibited or performed, they make the art space in London into an alternative public sphere, a place where (in essence) the community assembles for political expression through acoustic effort. On the one hand, these works can help their audiences to understand, awakening them so they can view clearly the complicated pan-Chinese society and its politics. On the other hand, in the objective environment, the context constructed by the works’ video/film media and soundscapes can engage participants affectively, impelling them, through a sense of belonging and activism, to help forge the specific-time-and-place-based London Sinophone art community.

Between 2019 and the pandemic outbreak, the new London Sinophone community became anchored in political and social transformations. While this unique atmosphere was important in shaping the community, the artists who’ve been involved in this community, and who’ve shaped and been shaped by it, may in the future return to their own cultural milieu to exhibit and create their works transnationally. The local culture of London has infiltrated the Chinese ethnic culture outside China geopolitically, resulting in a hybrid London dialect of Chineseness that exists on the outskirts of mainstream Chinese culture, scrutinizing and occasionally rejecting it in a desire for independence. It is worth noting that the works discussed here frequently connote, albeit in an often veiled and symbolic manner, political impulses opposed to the ruling political order, sparking activism and lyrical resistance. This community is likely to undergo changes paralleling the evolving political situations in mainland China and other Chinese communities, increasing the Sinophone community’s complexity and gradually creating cultural and ideological difference between its spectrum in the UK (the overseas Sinophoncity) and mainland China (where the authoritarian Chineseness rhetoric dominates). This division of the Sinophone community into culturally and ideologically distinct segments may in turn influence the foundation of China-centrism.