Inspired by the spatio-temporal dimensions of Tan Mu’s Signal series, the music performance “Everything on the Line” imaginatively reads the paintings as graphic notation. Dots of urban hubs and lines of submarine cables resemble celestial bodies and constellations to conjoin the ocean and the sky. The canvases may evoke the ancient Greek geometric harmony, the Chinese cosmology embodied in Qin, or for a modern audience, the chance composition of John Cage. The authorship of these scores, though, lies as much with the painter and the musicians as with a dynamic world deeply shaped by submarine cables and other forms of technological infrastructure. The lines on the canvas are transformed into musical phrasings that transcend the physical distance between the artwork and the viewer.
The performance also attempts to create a multisensory experience full of nuances between the abstract and the mimetic, the durational and the two-dimensional. If one finds comfort of serenity and perpetuity in Tan Mu’s paintings, the performance gives a picture of what lurks beneath. The tangible lines on the string instruments turn into abstract sounds and vibrations. Each sound created on a single string resembles the fragility inherent in every connection in our human and natural world - everything on the line.
