Artwork: No Regrets by Flora Yin Wong
As I’m not a native speaker, the sounds of Cantonese words have a nostalgic feeling to me in how I've heard them when growing up.
Looking back at something as sweet and simple as the memory of 90’s Cantopop songs that my dad would sing on TV karaoke when he used to see me once a week...I still remember the sounds of the lyrics even if I don’t know what they mean.
I can't read or write Chinese, so am often using Google Translate's clunky and error-ridden versions of phrases and words to find the meanings of things. Switching from Chinese to English and back, the words eventually lost themselves in immateriality and meaninglessness...
思念是一种很玄的东西
Missing thoughts is a very obscure thing,
Missing is a very mysterious thing 思念是一件很神秘的事情
如影~随形
无声又无息出没在心底
Like shadows taking shape of what ever,
就像影子塑造了曾經的樣子 / It's like the shadow has shaped what it used to be
转眼~吞没我在寂默里
Silently and breathlessly, resurface at the bottom of the heart, 無聲無息，在心底重新浮現 /
Silently, resurfaced in the bottom of my heart
我无力抗拒特别是夜里喔~
In a blink of an eye ~ shrouds me in loneliness,
一眨眼~把我吞沒了
I weakly fight against it, at night,
I'm willing to forget my name for you,
No regrets in losing the world, 失去世界不後悔
I'm willing to be left at the end of the world for you,
Silent and breathless in my heart, 无声又无息出没在心底
In a blink of an eye, engulfs me in silence, 一眨眼，讓我陷入沉默 / In the blink of an eye, I fell silent /
I was silent in the blink of an eye,
I miss you so much that I can't breathe,
大声的告诉你~
愿意为你我愿意为你
Even if I stay in your arms for a second,
It's not a pity to lose the world,
我愿意为你被放逐天
I am willing to be exiled to the sky for you 我願意為你被放逐到天空 / I am willing to be banished to
the sky for you
Willing for anything, 什么都愿意
Anything for you 什么都愿意为你 / Give you everything
Struggling amidst
掙扎中
heaven and earth when the dark night falls
黑夜降臨時的天地
heaven and earth are ours, when the sun rises
天地都是我們的，當太陽升起
In the early dawn, when the wind carries everything away
清晨，當風帶走一切
Nothing to seek, nothing to seek
Break through the heavens and the earth,
Ask for the night
Ordinary or ordinary
I have the world, but I want the sunrise.
I can see you early in the morning
I'm afraid of tomorrow’s high roads
When everything around you is like the wind
You let me find the root
I don't want to leave. 我不想離開
Flora Yin Wong, London-born of Chinese and Malaysian heritage, is an experimental sound artist and writer whose work combines field recordings and traditional early instruments – such as singing bowls, yangqin and kemence – with electronic processing and software, as well as text-based storytelling and abstraction. She released her debut album Holy Palm on Modern Love as a double LP last year, featuring two long-length soundpieces. Prior to that, she had worked with multi-disciplinary Berlin label PAN (Mark Leckey, Florian Hecker, Alexandra Domanovic) on their ‘mono no aware’ album – based around the impermanence of all things. Her tape EP City God, was inspired by the Daoist tradition of tutelary deities and the afterlife, using distorted sounds from temples she recorded in Hong Kong and China.
Artwork published as part of the Orchid Pavilion series Immaterial