09.Awakening from a Dream2025
Sound and Video
Sound
Video
Awakening from a Dream is an experiment exploring the instability of memory, the unfamiliarity of language, and the tension between sound and text. It is developed from a field recording I made two years ago on an island in eastern China.
The project investigates how personal memory — often fragmented and imprecise — can be reconstructed through sound and language. At the same time, it questions how precise of actual experience through text and language attempts to shape, stabilize, or even overwrite the actual experience of sound.
Video
The video consists of three basic elements:
The sound material is an unedited field recording from the island, which captures environmental
noises, human traces, and ambient soundscapes. These sounds carry specificity to me personally
but may sound abstract or unlocatable to others.
The subtitles appear in three languages: Traditional Chinese, English, and Korean. They are
composed of short fragments — recalling time, space, scene, or states I remember from that
location. I understand these three languages but they are not the most familiar to me. I need to
spend subtle time reading them, which creates distance from me and the text.
The blank screen intentionally removes any precise visual reference, allowing the sound and text
to become the only anchors for the audience’s imagination. This blankness creates a space of
ambiguity — where listening becomes a primary mode of perceiving, and where memory can
float without being visually fixed.