Where End Is Silent

  • 2022, single-channel video, five-channel sound, Dimensions variable.

2022 TAIWAN ART BIENNIAL: Love and Death of Sentient Beings
November 05th – March 05th, 2023, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts

Cheng Daoyuan is back with Consumed Leadens, his most private and intimate release after his debut album in 2019.

Cheng described the concept behind this release as “The Hybrid-death of Pieces from Past Which Buried in Grey”. Cheng spent years excavating from memories that were long been washed away, revisited with dissimulated perspectives, to make the final farewell of his selfhood.

Diverging from his previous harsh and apocalypse style, Cheng layered the emotions with atonality melodies, abstract pace, distorted vocals and deformation of field recordings, to construct an endless cycle of amnesty. Consumed Leadens reveals Cheng’s tenuous yet sophisticated side of his latest sonic exploration. Through ‘Fatelock’ for example, Cheng created Implicit and restrained ways of noise making that are filled with grotesque yet intricating usage of electronics and feedback, with occasion anonymous muttering that immerses you into a cinematic soundscape.

The two remixers brought the originals to the other end of the axis, aircode placed uncanny tensions in ‘Thus, Other Craving Continues’ that dissolve into astatic grooves while Alley Catss recreates ‘Absence of Substance’ in a dim and ethereal theme using destructive beats.

In the collaboration of artwork, harune.h, the artist and illustrator from Japan customize the artwork for the release. Gaining inspiration from listening to this release, she told us “I felt like I got a glimpse into your life.”