Buddhism emphasizes the practice of its doctrine. In other words, metaphysics requires the practice of ritual in daily life to confirm the corporeal presence (body presence) so that Buddhists can better understand what they have learned spiritually. Buddhism believes that the essence of the world is vibration and that the universe is a continuation of the sound of Om(唵), which influences my concept of composing with acoustic facts.
I believe that sound is a concrete embodiment of tactile experience. Following this belief, guide my compositional life back to the essence of vibration. The physical phenomenon that is vibration is becoming a certain kind of commonality (equality). Vibration does not discriminate, regardless of bodies, subjects, and objects. The intervention of language as semantic expression (meaning) seems to create some sort of inequality because language is hijacked by society and culture to form the power of discourse, creating a great deal of inequality. For example, the gaze of art discourse is often exerted on the exotic in its fantasies (ubiquitous). Born and identified as a Chinese composer and sound artist who believes in Buddhism, I refuse to be gazed at and labeled as such. Although I am deeply connected with both communities and am culturally rooted in both, I don’t want to label myself as a self-exotic artist and turn my upbringing into a certain stereotype. My sound works insist on returning to the vibrations of naïveté (relating to acoustic facts to stress a certain nonspecific) dissolving the inequalities created by the discourse of language and culture. Insist on nonspecific (refusing self-orientalism and being labeled) is my specific personal identity and I am not the endorsement of a stereotyped group. My insistence on my identity(nonspecific) gives birth to my artistic particularity and echoes the equality of vibration from Buddhism. Therefore, I pursue the use of compositional and sound art forms to represent the already obvious phenomenon（acoustic fact), not only to hear the sound but to touch the vibration, and to discover the indescribable artistic experience of the phenomenon happening in the space.
In terms of body presence, I emphasize theatricality. The theatricality of my works does not rely on the script but on the drama created by the representation of acoustic practice. Practitioners’ (my works’ experiencers) exploration of specific spaces and the acoustic facts comprise my scripts (the key to my theatrical presentation). For example, in my hybrid(composition & sound art) work Blind Opera (盲戏), the experiencers wear the programmed masks without eyeholes. They adjust their bodies and movements through the responded sounds of the masks (The programmed mask interacts with a specific space, which generates various sounds). In other words, Blind Opera allows the particularity of spatial information to guide players’ performances (both narration and theatricality of the performers’ bodies) so that space became the creator (composer or scriptwriter).
Xu Han 许瀚 