Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm is a series of works dealing with the relationship between acoustics and imagery and particularly the idea of yijing (one of the essential aspects of Chinese lyric aesthetics) in contemporary integrated sonic-visual artistic practice. In this exhibition, the sound works start with the repeated singing of poetry, and the calligraphic drawings with ink and brush are a kind of improvisational rhythmic drawings of the accumulation of painted sonic gestures, presenting the process of drawing the sound patterns while listening to the vocal performance.

The visual gestures, the movement, the passion become the graphic transcription of the sound. They are all different, layered together, as they were in the vocal performance. The repetition within the paintings recounts the repetition of the listening experience. The sonic‑visual space becomes a complex atmosphere of vocal and visual expressions. Together, the sonic patterns are revealed in the visuals, and the rhythmic flows heard in the paintings. As the scholar Su Shi (苏轼, 1037-1101) once advocated, “poetry in painting and painting in poetry.”

Ling Liu is a sound and image based artist. Born and educated in Hangzhou, China, she completed a BFA and MFA in Chinese painting and Chinese art history. Additionally, she finished a MFA in photographic and electronic media. Currently she is a PhD candidate in practice based artistic research at Burren College of Art.

Even while painting for almost her entire life, she now explores sonic and visual media as essential for combining her passion to unravel the development of Chinese art and history as both a deep and intricate tradition and one that continuously reverberates in the contemporary world of expanded media.

Her works traverse media of any and all kinds; each bringing its own possibility, each its own necessity, each its own encounter with history. Her most recent work Hearing Rhythm, Seeing Rhythm investigates the relationship between acoustics and imagery, tradition and contemporary, adopting contemporary art forms as methods for the reclamation of history, as well as adapting the traditional aesthetics of modernity as they extend into the 21st century.

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