Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, XVI. Peace, 2022. Copper foiled stained glass. Installation view at the Music Gallery, Toronto. Photo: Hao Nguyen.
Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, XII. Clubs, 2022. Copper foiled stained glass, bloodstone. Installation view at the Music Gallery, Toronto. Photo: Hao Nguyen.
Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, XVII. Node, 2022. Copper foil stained glass, mirror. Installation view at the Music Gallery, Toronto. Photo: Hao Nguyen.
Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, XX. Chip, 2022. Copper foiled stained glass, smokey quartz, lodestone, red garnet, citrine, sapphire, green tourmaline, raw black tourmaline, blue topaz, tanzanite, serpentine, sunset sodalite, peridot, blue lace agate, lemon calcite, labradorite. Installation view at the Music Gallery, Toronto. Photo: Hao Nguyen.
Prayer for 4 speakers was an installation as part of Strange Relief, a multi-part event series organized by Second Spring and hosted by Music Gallery in June 2022 at 918 Bathurst St. in Toronto. Voices by Amy Gottung, Trevor Shikaze, and Andrea Actis. Musical support by Michael Loncaric and Dylan Godwin. Link for more information here.
444-100122
—
One zero, zero one, two two.
Two leaves fall and rest on the back of my left hand, two leaves now falling off the back of my hand—four leaves, left, a leaf. 33 words.
Together we speak—sharing words in repetition, numbers in repetition—in unison, in overlap, separate, as a chorus. Two voices in the left ear, two voices in the right—a quartet between them. Please repeat with me, for four fortunes were upon us. There were four corners, four speakers, four walls, the room a rectangle. Forty-four degrees to the left, the room now a diamond. The room a valence of the room.
Still four speakers. Two speakers facing toward you, two speakers at your corners. Two speakers speaking to one another, sitting on chairs, turning to the left and to the right. Facing one another, with one chair between them, the roof rising at a pitch above, closing the four walls. Now four pitches—three harmonious, one diaphanous. Four C-sharps rising in the air of the room. Four C-sharps rising as the air of the room—shared with dust and illuminated by a break in the roof’s pitch. There is almost not an interval. A pitch repeats the air of the room. It is the speed of the room, the motion of the room. Music repeats the air meaningfully; it is haunted.
Again four pitches—three fastballs, one off-speed. Then four hits, four sounds—altogether the sound of a hit. Four 333-foot fly balls—at Comiskey Park, at Wrigley Field, at Exhibition Stadium, at Fenway Park. Three flyball outs, one home run. Four fields as four open rooms, propelled by the same rules, the rules repeated and modulated. The fields illuminated by the break of the earth’s atmosphere, illuminated by a continuous wall of artificial lights. The rooms are not cinematic, they were a dream—of fragments, of repetition, of apparition. They are a dream where repetition reveals itself as apparition.
333 words pass through the air. In this way a mouth is a mouth.
Together we speak. We form forgiving forums. You at a distance, kilometres repeating themselves, the landscape modulating by counting. A parrot on the beach. Two parrots on the beach. Four parrots on the beach (there where the grass can grow nearly four times yearly). A day, a day, a day, a night. Three dreams, one rehearsal—each a chorus of the other.
You haunt me with my words, but they are not mine. We borrow each other’s, we rehearse them for each other—altogether the sound of a word. The sound forms, for forcefully now, at 444 words, the air exits our bodies, the bodies of the speakers, the birds that multiply as you turn to the left. One speaker, two speakers, four speakers. One number augmented by three figures, sitting facing the same direction, listening to the air that moves between them. The air of passing musical gestures, moving against four stained glass pendants that rock imperceptibly on their chains in response, modulating the room without sound. The room framed by timber, containing all of this. A leaf, a club, an oak tree. Four leaves of glass hanging from the pitch of the roof, light passing through them, building the colour of the room, building the four corners of a diamond. The four of diamonds falls on the top of a table, for four fortunes were upon us. Four speakers speaking spoke. Four voices echoing the sound of four C-sharps—a call and response, an echo, a mirror, a chorus. The sounds fade gently, the room slows down.
I have not seen you in months now. It is 6:46. I have seen the pictures, they carry the room. They carry a record of its light—the room in the valence of that moment, filtered through the voice of the camera. The sound we hear is not a memory, but a premonition of the way in which the room moved sympathetically within soft cascades of sound. Two voices; an oak tree.
Heading back on the subway, I do not count the cars. The subway’s room a rectangle, now an S. Our words a memory and a script. The movement of my body and the movement of this memory acting in counterpoint, their momentum greater than my ability to hold them. I nearly miss my stop. Two leaves now falling off the back of my left hand.
Seven, five, zero.
The italicized phrases included in this piece are taken from Gertrude Stein's essay “Composition as Explanation” (1925–1926) and the poem “Cézanne” (1923).
Julian Yi-Zhong Hou is a multidisciplinary artist who currently resides in British Columbia, Canada. His current work centres around contemporary mystical themes including consciousness, synaesthesia, symbology, and experimental divination systems. Recent works have been shown on e-flux and in venues including Artpace San Antonio, The Music Gallery (Toronto), Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Artspeak (Vancouver), and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Hou holds a BA in Art and Culture Studies from Simon Fraser University and a MArch from the University of British Columbia. He helps to organize the collaborative artist imprint and project space Second Spring.
Shane Krepakevich is an amateur photographer born in St. Pierre-Jolys, Manitoba in the final hours of 1979.