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Waiting Room
2023
Directional speaker, travel flyer, cantilever chair, fake tree





Waiting Room is a site-specific sound installation. Visitors could sit on the modernist chair and consume the music resonated in the ethnographic museum (RJM). 

Exotica is a popular music genre massively produced in the 50s to cater to a postwar public. Geared towards the white bourgeois, Exotica comprises standard orchestras, instruments, and identifiable sounds from the Pacific, Asia, Brazil, and Africa, such as vibraphones, percussion, gamelan, string instruments, and even bird chirping. Rather than aiming for authenticity, it aims for lightweight entertainment packaged in an easily digestible form, such as a jungle scene or a beach resort. Exotica constructs an imaginary spectacle of a faraway land. It is a universal, vague, and decontextualized sound, directing us to complete nothingness, an imagined land that never existed. This genre of music is removed from its cultural origins, environment, and the communities it represents. Likewise, the objects on display or in storage within the museum also undergo a similar process of detachment, a form of violence.

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