Tak-Cheung Hui

Faded ink, yellowed paper, traces of time, the loss and deformation of information is not necessarily damaging the work, but could also be part of it inadvertently. These are what strikes me from Ma Yuan’s Ink wash painting series Water Album, and these are also the theme of the Water Album. From purely physical phenomena to the cultural level, exploring the disappearance of sounds from multi-angle, and presents them in a non- linear way. In 2018-20, I composed three Water Albums, which are for ensemble pieces of different instrumentation. Even though they are inspired by Ma Yuan’s Twelve Water Albums, they do not point to any specific images. It is more about looking for a tangible connection between the water as a cultural symbol, and some smallest personal feelings.The theme of the Water Album #I Seascape is “origin”. The journey of making this music is like drawing a line that traces Buddhism music from modern-day back to the old tradition, as well as from the Far Eastern Asian back to Nepal. Elements were extracted from field recordings of different regions and transformed through methods such as stretching and filtering. These elements are then superposed and created a soundscape that is constantly shifting between these elements from different areas and times.