聽寫王系列
TengSeWong/VoiceWriter Series

 

 

When I first arrived at Santa Cruz, I was a bit confused by the Spanish that most people spoke to me. I do not know Spanish at all and it sounded to me such an ‘exotic’ language, very fiery, zealous and cheery. I tried to pick up the feeling of what others are saying to me, and I can only use very simple English when communicating with others.

This work is about the ambiguity of languages in inter-cultural communication. During my residency in the KM.0 URBANO International Artist Workshop, I recorded greetings from other participating artists from different parts of the world in their mother tongues, and transcribed it into Chinese using the ‘TengSeWong’ voice writer software in my computer. The text, of course, does not make any sense at all because the software only works with Chinese language. On the other hand, I used an online translator to translate a list of sentences that I often encounter when making new friends, for example, ‘Hello, my name is wen yau!’, ‘Where are you from?’, ‘Sorry I can't understand’, etc, from English to Spanish. The two sets of bizarre translated text in Chinese and Spanish were paired up randomly and was written and scattered on walls in different places inside the museum where the participating artists work together in the last two weeks.

Other than the presentation in the museum, there was a live performance in the plaza in Santa Cruz city centre.
I greeted the passers-by in the plaza with ‘!Hola, mi nombre es wen yau!’ (Hello, my name is wen yau!) and their response was input into the voice writer in my computer and projected on the floor. The transcribed text was then copied by handwriting on the plaza and the audience was invited to put a face mask next to their Chinese ‘names’. Finally the names in non-sensible Chinese language filled up the plaza with distorted faces and was being washed away by footsteps of other passers-by in the plaza until they all faded.