Some Thoughts on “ALONGSEN TEN CE” and its Concepts
Language and Meaning
“ALONGSEN TEN CE” is an experiment centred on language and text. It may look chaotic at first, but it follows concerns that have shaped my practice for many years. The work can be understood through three interconnected layers:
The first layer involves the fragmentation and reconstruction of language. Texts from literature, history, philosophy, political figures, and other sources, are reassembled into something that resembles a narrative. Spaces are added to interrupt the flow, disrupting conventional reading and making meaning unstable.
The work also addresses the disintegration of meaning. Instead of using language to state the artist’s position—like speaking through an authoritative voice—it lets the text disappear, detach, and break apart in the exhibition space. When words are removed, displaced, or rearranged, sentences can become absurd, illogical, or unexpectedly open-ended. English sentences printed on fabric strips are scattered, twisted, and layered across the floor. Their fragments combine into new meanings, or close to meanings, different from their sources. So language stops being a stable tool but becomes something material: something that can be cut, rearranged, rewritten, and distorted. From then on, authority and the only single voice are prevented from dominating in the process of meaning creation.
Medium, Media and Performance
The second layer focuses on the interaction between forms and media. Text begins as a two-dimensional sign on paper, then expands into three-dimensional space through cutting, attaching, and even printing on fabric strips suspended from the ceiling or spread across the floor. It becomes something to see, move through, and experience physically—organically dispersed throughout the exhibition space.
Projected text on the main wall, on the other hand, brings this instability into time. Words appear out of sequence and at disrupted intervals, preventing a complete or stable reading. Sound behaves similarly in that it shifts between computer-simulated speech and the artist’s improvised readings and shouts through a megaphone. The cold, mechanical quality of the synthetic voice contrasts with the amplified live voice, which restores breath, emotion, and the presence of the speaker.
And in the two performances, reading no longer functions to communicate with the others. Words are randomly combined and broken apart, while sentences act more like units of sound—extended, interrupted, repeated, or shouted. Recordings are replayed in the exhibition space, so live and recorded sound, improvisation and replay, and human and simulated voices all overlap at the same time in the space. Over the year, the performance also shifted away from simply reading and shouting words at the beginning of the exhibition, and towards a stronger focus on rhythm, sound, and reverberation at the end of it, which reflects and connects with the work’s political and historical layer of meaning.
History, Politics, and the Noises
The third layer – political and historical implications: A twentieth-century historical event, in which a leader gave a speech to students in the square through a megaphone in his hand, serves as an important and strong reference for the work. Fragments of the speech enter the text, while the image of his megaphone also becomes a key element of the exhibition poster.
A megaphone is an instrument of propaganda, mobilisation, and command that transmits power through sound. But when it is brought into the exhibition space, placed on a white platform, and reappropriated through readings, shouts, and randomised language, it loses its authority. What remains are sounds, fragments of speech, and noise that seem absurd, monotonous, and disconcerting.
When language may be arbitrarily recombined, when missing words alter a sentence, when projections disrupt reading, and when speech becomes noise and echo, text can no longer serve as reliable evidence but as random signs that generate absurdity and uncertainty. It may preserve memory but also produce forgetting; it may communicate important messages, but repeated rewriting can also erode its original meanings. History and truth thus appear as structures vulnerable to manipulation and distortion.
The Final Stage
Towards the end of the exhibition, the three layers begin to merge in increasingly profound ways. The projections become blurred and lose their legibility. Fabric texts are rolled into circular forms, transforming open sentences into enclosed objects—like the final full stop of a long sentence. Letters removed from the walls are gathered in transparent boxes resembling coffins or oversized books. Words remain visible, but their original form and function are all gone so that they only become linguistic relics, like some sealed traces of history.
In the final performance, reading, echo, and noise merge into an intense sound field: kind of like an ultimate cry after meaning has been exhausted and social structures have collapsed, as if the megaphone’s voice were being used not to speak, but to shoot and destroy the words, meanings and ultimately our civilisation.
From splicing and reading in the beginning, through distortion and layering, to blurring, enclosure, and shouting at the end, “ALONGSEN TEN CE” moves from apparently comprehensible text towards a condition in which language keeps losing its own meaning. It tries to show language as ambiguous, abstract, absurd, and open to manipulation—while also probing how closely language is tied to power, politics, and history.