You & I
Joáo Cocteau, Berlin
March 2 - April 1, 2012
You & I is comprised of works that looks at the relationship of music and written texts. Singaporean artist, Song-Ming Ang, asks the public to write him anything personal - ‘personal’ meaning both literal and figurative.
Rather than disassembling, deconstructing and re-interpreting the language originally used to form a personal statement, the artist will strive to maintain its context by keeping its sources evident and the speeches intact.
In doing so, the artist will comment to the letters by sending a mix CDR as a response, utilizing his iTunes library as a means to communicate back.
Employing humor, metaphor and an encyclopedic approach, the artist raise awareness and connection to the underlying structure of the language that sculpts and embodies the essence of communication.
The work in You And I: Berlin develops from a highly personalized specificity to line on the collective and the personal. The artist assumes the tracks from his iTunes library as sentences, phrases, and metaphors embodying a complex structure of language that is universal and communicable.
Song-Ming Ang’s collection of tracks, for instance, appear at first glance to be generic, but the precise and heartfelt appropriation of tracks in a CDR format is executed with concentration and personal planning.
The artist reads the letters, then internalize, and relates to the letter with his own personal philosophy. Thus his process-oriented methodology can be seen as a channeling of a dialogue that transforms written words to musical tracks opening new limbs that shortens the emotional distance between the artist and the sender.
This method likens to the way in which one can combine, recombine and communicate a language that resides in the realm of the internal and external, the mental and the physical.
