Linger in Sounds: The (For)getaway is a lecture and sound performance, revisiting music videos that emerged through China’s popular music scene between the late 1980s and early 2000s. Assembling recurring visual metaphors and changing sonic expressions in the videos, the performance chronicles how they function as a desiring-making machine, shaping the modern Chinese subject. Through the intimate gestures of listening and singing, the work reveals how this subject, created through the post-Mao state project of modernization, is ever-mobile, striving, cosmopolitan, and, at the same time, forgetful of China’s various historical traumas. Blending TV commercials, music videos, and autobiographical utterances, the performance opens a lyrical soundscape, rendering audible and visible an affective politics that shapes, stretches, and mobilizes the individual in the name of freedom, love, and romance. 

Led by Qu Chang and Hui Ye, Linger in Sounds is a long-term artistic research, focusing on early popular music in China. It explores the affective landscape formed during the economic reform (1978-) through pop music, taking the latter’s visual culture as an important portal into the politics of affect. Linger in Sounds: The (For)getaway is a special edition made for the closing of the exhibition Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests. At the end of the performance, audience members are invited to join an evening karaoke, singing songs from different areas and eras, about travelling, adventuring, searching, and self-making by being on the road.