Yuen Chee Wai
Yuen Chee Wai is a musician, artist, designer, and curator. Often inspired by ideas and perspectives glimpsed through the filmic eye and photographic lens, Yuen’s stylistic oeuvre in art and improvised music is marked by internalised reflections on memory and loss, invisibility, and indeterminacy. He currently researches flora, fauna, and funga, caves and prehistoric humans through the lens of speculative world-building and geological deep time. In 2008, together with Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Ryu Hankil (South Korea), and Yan Jun (China), he formed FEN (Far East Network), an improvised music unit focusing on the multifaceted networks and collaborations between musicians and artists in Asian countries. He is also a member of The Observatory, in which he plays guitar, synth, and electronics, and co-curates a vanguard of its initiatives like BlackKaji, Source, and Playfreely. He tours extensively with FEN and The Observatory, and has presented at MIMI Festival, Lausanne Underground Music and Film Festival, All Ears Festival, Ftarri Festival, Gwangju Biennale, CTM Festival, and Diage Festival.
Performance: The Embargo of Silence
The Embargo of Silence is conceived and curated by Yuen Chee Wai. A concert built on a silent-disco sound system, it is heard only through headphones, by performers and audience alike. DJ 味王 weiwang, Lai Tsung-Yun (LTY) and Yuen Chee Wai play live, moving between improvised electronic music and DJ sets, while siloed within luminous scaffolds designed by DuckUnit.
It introduces a deliberately introspective mode of listening — one where sound does not announce itself into space but waits to be encountered. Rather than resonating publicly, the music trespasses directly into the listener’s inner terrain, allowing interpretation and response to unfold privately rather than collectively. The work shifts music from something that occupies the room to something that occupies the body. Every listener becomes a singular room.
The choreography is both possessional and processional. No one can be sure what anyone else is hearing: shared yet unverified, withheld yet unapologetic. This is the secrecy of the medium, the embargo of silence.