Lucia Chung

Lucia H Chung is a Taiwanese artist based in London, UK.

She performs and releases music under the alias ‘en creux’ where the sound creation springs from her fascinations in noise generated via feedback on digital and analogue equipment, and her role as a ‘mediator-performer’ in the multifaceted relationship between the sonic events incurring within the self-regulated system. She also works as a broadcaster and an independent curator at Happened. She has curated and organised residency programmes and music events around the UK and Europe.

Lucia’s presentation talked about her early work and inspirations. She mentions being inspired by the work of Jacob Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms, a project in which 4 abandoned rooms inside the zone of exclusion in Chernobyl were recorded and played back in the same manner as Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room”(1970) demonstrating the resonances of the room from their own feedback.

Feedback is something that I will most certainly explore further and already experiment with. Most of my experiments have been done with microphone feedback and filtered oscillators.

There is something about the sound of feedback, its piercing resonance, that has always intrigued me. In a musical sense, guitar feedback has been used intentionally by many influential rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, Robert Fripp. Artists such as Alvin Lucier, Hugh Davies, Steve Reich used feedback in their work.

I also find the location of Chernobyl to be alluring in its unique desolation. I find abandoned places and buildings very aesthetically beautiful when nature reclaims them. This romanticism likely comes from the visual appearance of pillboxes and tank blocks that are dotted around the countryside at home.

There is also the physical alienation of such structures. Monolithic, brutal and utilitarian, they now stand faded, covered in ivy surrounded by seas of stinging nettles. Perhaps less romanticly, a great deal of them seem to become public urinals graffitied with obscenities.

In the future, I wish to explore such structures in their dilapidation and create a work from them.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *