Wushuang Tong
Visuality Beyond Itself: Applying Synaesthesia to the Translation and Transformation of Music and Painting
Summary
This practice-based research explores the process of translating music into painting and the amalgamation of the two. By introducing the concept of auditory-visual synaesthesia, the artist leapfrogs the boundary between hearing and sight, deliberates the correspondence between music and painting, and proposes that synaesthesia can be a new means of creative activity. Based on a critical investigation of relevant theories and practices, the study employs listening and music analysis as methods that stretch music from the dimension of time to the dimension of space. On the ground of the proximate relation between music and visuality, the artist selects representative works of music from different periods of history and then applies her auditory-visual synaesthesia to translate every piece into a painting. In this coalescence, the affective language of music and painting expand or collapse, which conduces unpredictable results challenging the relationship between the artist, artworks, and viewers.
Additional info
At the scientific level, synaesthesia is a neurological trait that results in abnormal sensory blending — the stimulation of one sense leads to an involuntary reaction in another sense. This is the most general explanation. But this definition that mentions a narrow range overlooks one significant aspect of synaesthesia: the cultural level, which includes areas such as synaesthetic perception, synaesthetic metaphor, and artistic synaesthesia that cannot be clearly defined.
For this research, the concept of synaesthesia deployed mainly focuses on being a means of connecting sound and vision. By translating and transforming music into paintings and installations, the study explores the correspondence between music and the visual from forms to affective language.
Biography
Wushuang Tong is an artist, cellist and researcher focusing on the proximity between and music and the visual. She works across painting, installation, and poetry, with a particular research interest in their linkages with music. She holds a BA in literature from Wuhan University, a BFA in fine arts from School of the Art Institutes of Chicago, and an MFA in fine arts from School of Visual Arts, New York. In college, she served as the principal cellist in the symphony orchestra, and today she presents the melody in her research and artworks.
Wushuang is based in New York. Her artwork has been exhibited and collected internationally, including in London, New York, Shanghai, Berlin, and Singapore.
Wushuang played a cello solo in a performance. (photo credit: Sihang Sun)
Research Assets
Artist Website: tongwushuang.com
Listening and Music Analysis as Methods
As an artist whose practice has always been accompanied by music, Wushuang’s synaesthesia is rooted in the hours of learning the cello in her childhood and the experience in orchestras for seven years. These indelible memories are deeply engraved in her mind and become a means of perception and thinking, which affects her creative process.
Art Practice
There are seven major historical periods in Western music: the Medieval age, Baroque era, Classical period, Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism. Wushuang selected 1-2 representative works from each of the later five periods, from the Baroque to Post-modernism, to translate into a painting.
- Baroque Era
Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major, 122 * 92 cm, oil on canvas, 2021
- Classical Period
Haydn: Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major, 122 * 152 cm, oil on canvas, 2021
Mozart: Serenade No. 13 in G major, 122 * 122 cm, oil on canvas, 2021
- Romanticism
Saint Saëns: The Swan, 122 * 92 cm, oil on canvas, 2021
Wagner: Ride of the Valkyries, 122 * 152 cm, oil on canvas, 2021
- Modernism and Postmodernism
Piazzolla: Libertango, 122 * 92 cm, oil on canvas, 2021
Philip Glass: Glassworks, 152 * 122 cm, oil on canvas, 2021
Reflection on Practice
The means of the translation varies with the genre of music. For concertos, sonatas, and others with a strict format, Wushuang usually designs a graphic to simulate direct correspondence. While for suites, extracts, and kinds with flexible structures, she focuses more on matching music's emotion and the painting's atmosphere. The term "translation" in the research is not thoroughly felicitous to the context of "language translation." There is no precise one-to-one equivalence between painting and music. "Translation" here points out the process of applying particular standards to convert an abstract artistic system into another.
The translation is not fixed. A hundred years ago, Claude Monet painted the same garden, the same haystack, and the same houses of Parliament again and again. The scenery is unchanging; what keeps shifting is the encounter that changes over time. Likewise, this "bilingual" dictionary of music-to-painting, compiled by Wushuang, is destined to be rewritten constantly.
Related Artworks
Although these works are not direct research outcomes, they all relate to the artist's concept of connecting music and visual arts.
Travellers, 2021
Work in progress. Wushuang used software to blend and deform her work with the Chinese classical painting to visualise the transmission of music in the water and air.
Wonder, 2020
The sculpture is designed for a K12 full-time private school. Wushuang hoped to provide some delightful and pleasing air for the school, and immediately she thought about Minuet - the music for dance. The synaesthesia works here is to transfer music from a very abstract form to an entity.
