Hong-Kai Wang

Artist Hong-Kai Wang, whose work is featured in the exhibition Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen at Nottingham Contemporary, shares a special contribution from her research around the ‘Sugarcane Song’ – created and sung during the 1925 Erlin Sugarcane Workers’ incident in Japanese-colonised Taiwan. Written by a local doctor Li Ying-Chang, who treated many of the sugarcane workers, the song documents what is arguably the first anti-colonial, class-conscious agrarian uprising in Taiwan’s history. While the original melody of ‘Sugarcane Song’ has been lost, the lyrics have survived. Wang uses these lyrics to speculatively work through histories of labour and resistance in workshops where new melodies for the song are collectively reimagined and sung. In this special contribution, we hear excerpts from two workshops led by Wang with different communities. The first is the Dongshih Workshop, which took place with sugarcane workers at the Sugar Cane Supply Office of the Huwei Sugar Factory, and the second excerpt is from a workshop with the KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (KCSC) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Hong-Kai Wang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Taipei, Taiwan who works across exhibition making, performance, publication, and workshop that involve collective, pedagogical, and embodied practices of sociality. Her research-based practice is informed by the unceasing tension between languages, ideologies, identities, and knowledge regimes. By attending to and contending with the questions of auditory perception and the politics of knowing, Wang’s work seeks to reveal different modes of attention, further conceiving of emergent time-spaces that critically interweave histories of labor, economies of cohabitation, formations of knowledge, and production of desire.