Sounds of Remembering · Nonggang, Guangxi

This site-based installation took place in Nonggang, a village along the China–Vietnam border within a protected nature reserve. The work emerged from materials already embedded in the local agricultural landscape: hundreds of bamboo poles used to support sugarcane fields, combined with small bells and luminous materials traditionally used in ritual practices to commemorate the deceased.

Developed in collaboration with local women, bells were tied to the bamboo poles, allowing sound to be activated by wind, bodily movement, and subtle environmental changes. The luminous materials carry a memorial function, responding to local narratives shared by villagers, who recalled encounters with human remains in the surrounding forests during the period around the 1990s, when people crossing or living near the border faced heightened risk and loss.

Rather than representing these histories directly, the installation holds them through sound, light, and collective presence. Agricultural structures become listening instruments, while ritual materials mark remembrance without fixing it into narrative or image. Sound unfolds through chance and environmental forces, allowing memory, landscape, and everyday life to coexist without hierarchy.

Situated within a borderland ecology and nature reserve, the work listens to how cultivation, protection, memory, and loss are entangled across human and non-human worlds. The installation does not seek resolution, but creates a shared field in which sound carries traces of both living labor and absent lives.