Mirror Three is part of a continuing series of collaborative sound and video works between Ōtautahi-based Noel Meek and Beijing-based Yan Jun. Their work explores two lived environments a world apart.
Yan Jun’s “micro feedback” techniques, utilising very small microphones and speakers, reflect the intensely urban, anthropocentric Beijing environment he primarily works in. Noel Meek’s found materials (including stone, metals, wood, plastics) echo the Ōtautahi Residential Red Zone that his workspace borders, drawing sonically on discarded objects and materials found in abandoned gardens and other non-anthropocentric places.
Jun and Meek’s collaborations are created according to tight pre-set parameters and neither artist hears the other’s work until the pieces are mixed. Each iteration of their “Mirror” series explores these divergent sound practices, reflecting both the contrasting locales each artist works in and allowing the sounds to forge their own relationships with each other.
Drawn from the divergent soundworlds in Ōtautahi and Beijing, Mirror Three takes on new resonances in Te Tuhi’s Speaker Space in Pakuranga, Aotearoa, a location caught in the interstices of suburban and urban development.
Group of Three interprets Mirror Three
Saturday 19 August 2023
At the opening of the exhibition on Saturday 19 August, Noel Meek will be joined by his long-running collaborator Sean Martin-Buss, plus Jess Robinson, for a special performance that will musically interrogate Meek and Jun’s sound installation, Mirror Three. Working in the outdoor space around Te Tuhi, Meek, Martin-Buss and Robinson will use improvisation, close-listening and musicking to re-enchant the everyday soundworld of Pakuranga.
About the artists
Yan Jun
Yan Jun is a multidisciplinary artist working with field recording, voice, body, text and noise. He performs regularly throughout Europe, Asia and the US. He has released more than 100 solo or collaborative audio works on CD, LP and cassette. In 2000 he founded the Beijing-based Sub Jam arts organisation. He has published more than 20 books about music in Chinese, has been translated into French, English and Spanish, and is an editor of Leonardo Music Journal. As a poet he has attended the Rotterdam and Berlin International Poetry Festivals.
Noel Meek
Noel Meek is a Pākehā musician, composer and video artist based in Ōtautahi Christchurch. His interest is in finding meeting points with the non-human world and with te ao Māori in an effort to explore what decolonised works rooted in the whenua of Aotearoa might be. He has presented works with SCAPE Public Art, The Adam Art Gallery, St Paul St Gallery, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, The chronicle of <_______>, The Len Lye Foundation and CoCA Toi Moroki.