“I wish I was a piece of field recording.”
Yan Jun
Yan Jun is a musician and poet, born in Lanzhou in 1973 and currently based in Beijing. His work transcends the boundaries between improvised music, experimental music, field recording, performance, organising and writing. Alongside performing in venues, he also runs a project called Living Room Tour, where he goes to the audience’s homes to play with the environment and whatever else is available in the room.
He is a member of FEN, Tea Rockers Quintet and Impro Committee, and founder of the guerrilla label Sub Jam.
Yan Jun’s work was accompanied by a sense of humour and focus on performance and subverting the social and performative expectations of certain environments. He talked briefly about Tan Ping, a current social movement/behaviour in china where the youth are choosing to reject the pressure of long hours of stressful work. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60353916)
He alluded to the humourous nature of his work taking this absurdist perspective, as opposed to the seriousness of making outright political statements. I found these two political angles interesting, they tackle the same issue with opposite approaches.