TAICHUNG CITY.- The NTMoFA and the Centre Pompidou jointly stage the exhibition “Of Anarchy in Music: More Journeys in Sound.”
In collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) presents the major exhibition Of Anarchy in Music. More Journeys in Sound. Bringing together remarkable works by 30 artists and artist groups from Taiwan and around the world, the exhibition invites visitors to explore interlacing paths around sound as a medium of choice in contemporary art.
Curated by Marcella Lista (chief curator, New Media Collection, Centre Pompidou), this exhibition highlights pivotal developments over the past twenty years at the intersection of experimental music, sound installation and post-conceptual practices. Drawing from the phenomenology of acoustic space to the training of networked data, “sound” today prompts incisive and vivid artistic experiments through an unprecedented array of forms, concepts, and modes of dissemination. Organized into eight sections—Echo and Resonance, Listening Machines, More of the Ensemble, Open Scores, In Drifts, Scenes and Gestures, Sonic Inquiries, and The Proxy Voice—the exhibition introduces the Centre Pompidou’s pioneering New Media Collection, including major pieces by celebrated artists such as Bill Fontana, Christian Marclay, Susan Philipsz, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and Yuko Mohri, alongside the compelling works by artists from Asia and Taiwan, including Fujui Wang, Chi-Wei Lin, Samson Young, Chia-En Jao, Chung-Kun Wang, as well as Hong-Kai Wang in collaboration with Lou Mo, Alia Mossallam and Keijiro Suga. The curation of the show reflects on the intertwined legacies of the 20th century avant-garde and Taiwan’s noise music movement, addressing music and sound’s continued engagement in alternative modes of thinking and addressing the social space—what Anthropologist David Graeber would describe as “micro-theories” of transformation.
Highlights of the exhibition include Bill Fontana’s 28-channel ever-evolving composition Parallel Soundings: Silent Echoes and the Melting Glacier (2024) and Chia-En Jao’s newly commissioned sound installation Jardin du Monde. Fontana’s work ponders uncertainty. Capturing the resonance of Paris’s soundscape within the silent bells of Notre-Dame after the fire, the artist weaves these recordings together with the inaudible sounds of a melting glacier in Austria, captured using hydrophones. The resulting interlaced vibrations subtly interact with the surrounding environment, echoing events outside the frame. Created in 2025, Jao’s Jardin du Monde draws on musical scores of popular tunes published in Europe in the era of Universal Exhibitions. Using cover images, lyrics, and melodies as his starting point, the artist has conceived a labyrinthine archive that leads to a monumental kinetic sound sculpture made of steel beams and chandelier crystals. The work’s spatial configuration refers to 17th-century European palace gardens, with musical scores classified regionally in a manner reminiscent of botanical taxonomy. Jao interrogates the traces of colonial history embedded in popular culture and their continued resonance today.
Of Anarchy in Music. More Journeys in Sound is on view until 6 July 2025 spanning the outdoor and indoor spaces of the NTMoFA. As visitors move through the venue, they will find themselves immersed in a surprising diversity of acoustic situations, discovering how sound transcends the confines of vision and opens up an entirely new sensory journey. We warmly invite everyone to take part in this exceptional event.
Participating artists: Francis Alÿs, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Éric Baudelaire, Edmond Couchot and Michel Bret, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Dumb Type, Bill Fontana, Gary Hill, Jao Chia-en, Hassan Khan, Mark Leckey, Lin Chi-Wei, Liu Chuang, Christian Marclay, Yuko Mohri, Emeka Ogboh, Susan Philipsz, Maxime Rossi, Molly Soda, Sun Wei, Mika Tajima, Naama Tsabar, Steina Vasulka and Woody Vasulka, Wang Changcun, Wang Chung-Kun, Wang Hong-Kai, Lou Mo, Alia Mossallam & Keijiro Suga, Wang Fujui, Elsa Werth, Samson Young, Zhou Tao.
