Errant ListeningThe House of Onomatopoeia: A Sound Workshop, Lecture and PerformanceYang Yu-Chiao

Yang Yu-Chiao, The House of Onomatopoeia, Hsinchu City Art Gallery, 2025. Photo by Hai Lin. Image courtesy of Yang Yu-Chiao

The second event in Errant Listening presents a workshop, lecture, and collective performance led by Taiwanese artist Yang Yu-Chiao, whose practice operates at the intersection of folklore telling, sound improvisation and poetic writing.

Rooted in narrative and linguistic study, Yang approaches the folktale as a generative structure through which traditional modes of storytelling are reactivated via field recording, embodied vocal practice, and improvised performance. Central to this practice is an engagement with onomatopoeia, informed in part by Gérard Genette’s theory of semantic opacity, in which sound and meaning remain inseparably entangled for those who perform them. Through these sonic-linguistic experiments, Yang creates acoustic territories where domestic sounds wander, disrupt, and reconfigure space, slipping beyond it while unfolding into shared, collective registers of listening and voicing.

The event begins with a closed-door workshop led by the artist. Participants will be invited to record sounds from their domestic environments, which will then be translated into onomatopoeic characters. These vocalised fragments will serve as material for a shared performative score, activated collectively by the participants and the artist.

The workshop is followed by a public presentation in which Yang will introduce their artistic practice and ongoing research, interwoven with moments of improvised performance. The event culminates in a group performance developed from the workshop prior, unfolding as a collective act of listening and sounding.

Schedule
2–3pm   Closed-door workshop
3–3.30pm Break
3.30–5pm Lecture and performance

Free entry, sign-up essential.(Separate registrations are required for the workshop and the lecture)

The workshop is sign-up only and capacity is limited. The workshop participants will be asked to stay until 5pm to take part in the group performance. Please register only if you are able to commit to full participation.

Errant Listening is an experimental, open-ended programme series that attends to the sonic dimensions of contemporary artistic practice, documentation, and curation. The series explores how sound wanders, unsettles, and exceeds the structures that seek to contain it. By focusing on the un/archivable – the sounds and vibrations that slip away, withdraw, or refuse legibility – and foregrounding the sonic agency embedded within these activities and gatherings, the series proposes ways of understanding the archive not as preservation, but as attunement, and listening not as perception, but as transformation.