Conference Agenda

This study examines how Tan Dun’s Buddha Passion (2018) sonically reimagines the sacred spatiality of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, a UNESCO World Heritage site known for its immersive visual and architectural complexity. I argue that the work constructs a multidimensional musical spatiality by drawing together three complementary perspectives. First, physical and cultural geography frame space and place as shaped by environmental context, cultural memory, and embodied experience (Tuan 1977; Massey 2005). Second, Wu Hung’s concept of “total space” provides a model for understanding how material, perceptual, and experiential dimensions function together in Buddhist visual practice and can be extended to musical analysis (Wu 2023). Third, sound studies demonstrate how listening generates spatial presence and supports geographic imagination (Feld 1996; Blesser and Salter 2007). Through this framework, Buddha Passion emerges not merely as a reference to Dunhuang, but as a reconstruction of its spatial logic in sound.

Read through this interdisciplinary lens, the work functions as a sonic reconfiguration of Dunhuang’s spatial imagination, translating geographic, material, and ritual dimensions into musical form. This transformation becomes evident in the work’s compositional detail, where instrumental sonority, perceptual processes, and cultural associations coalesce to produce spatial meaning. An analysis of the “Nirvana” section of Act Six illustrates the interplay of material, perceptual, and experiential space. In the opening nine bars, stone chimes, sustained strings, and choral timbres establish a layered material space. The continuity of the choral chanting is reinforced through timbral augmentation (McAdams 1999), as sustained strings extend and stabilize its presence. Meanwhile, the timbral heterogeneity between the chimes and the choral–string layer grants the chimes perceptual prominence through their clear attacks, bright spectra, and inharmonic overtones. Repeated pitches delineate a perceptual space characterized by what Arnie Cox terms iterative motion (Cox 2011). In the experiential dimension, the chimes recall their traditional ritual function in Chinese settings, where they articulate sacred time and structure communal participation, lending the passage culturally grounded expressive significance. The “Nirvana” example thus reflects broader strategies by which Buddha Passion transforms Dunhuang’s spatial and ritual imagination into an immersive sonic experience.

This paper argues that the screen in installation art functions as an acoustic boundary that composes perspective, shaping how bodies hear, move, and register authority in space. I propose screened listening as a musicological analytic for installation practice: a way of hearing how feedback systems, caption infrastructures, and exhibition acoustics organize attention, distribute sonic authority, and choreograph presence. Drawing on Blesser & Salter’s notion of aural architecture (2009) — how built environments shape what and how we hear — and extending it to mediated exhibition environments, I examine works by three Asian diasporic artists to show how mediation itself becomes the compositional subject.

In TV Buddha (1974), Nam June Paik constructs a closed-circuit feedback loop that functions as an acoustic enclosure. The seated Buddha confronts its own live image; the monitor regulates liveness by collapsing past and present into a continuously renewing now. The loop converts viewing into duration rather than narrative progression. Perspective here is infrastructural, authored by the camera-monitor circuit that synchronizes bodies within the same temporal frame.

In Close Readings (2020), Christine Sun Kim relocates narrative authority from image to caption. By layering Deaf-authored text over muted film clips, she treats written language as a compositional device. Captioning reorganizes sonic authorship, multiplies temporalities of access, and reveals the uneven infrastructure of listening. The screen becomes a contested acoustic surface where legibility is staged as an architectural condition of sound.

Wu Tsang’s Anthem (2021), installed in the Guggenheim’s spiraling rotunda, transforms the museum’s ramp into a compositional device. The vertical projection and Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s layered vocals engage the building’s continuous curve, where reverberation, height, and circulation shape how sound is perceived. Perspective emerges along the ramp as voice becomes architectural material; listening unfolds in motion, distributed across vertical ascent.

Across these cases, the screen evolves from enclosure (Paik) to redistribution (Kim) to immersion (Tsang). Together they show how installation art engineers listening through circuits, captions, and architectural movement that calibrate presence in real time. By foregrounding mediation as musical form, this study reframes installation art as infrastructural listening, arranging intimacy, access, and collectivity in public space.

In the contemporary PRC, there are two major categories of Buddhist music. The first includes the traditional Buddhist chants and ensembles preserved in temples and performed by monks or nuns for ceremonies. The second, which is the subject of this paper, involves a body of modern songs and instrumental music which presents clear programmatic themes resonating with Chinese Han Buddhist teaching, history, and literature, but remains separate from the strictures of its ceremonies. Pitch in these contemporary works relies mainly on traditional Chinese pentatonicism, but the overall instrumentation is strongly influenced by Western popular music. This cross-cultural blend has reached beyond the Buddhist temple to be popularized in secular settings and embraced by Han Buddhist followers and ordinary people alike. The result is a thriving genre that has intersected with many aspects of Chinese popular culture and social life during the latter 20^th century and beyond.

To examine the conceptual meanings, musical characteristics and social implications of this contemporary genre, this paper uses the methodologies of historiography, archive studies, and digital ethnography. Based on the theory of progressive authenticity (Zhang, 2020) and the theory of practice (Bourdieu, 1977) this essay interprets the formation and development of popular Buddhist music and its progressively established cultural authenticity, not as a static product, but as a fluid, ongoing social process. This process has incorporated Chinese Buddhist ideologies, Han cultural traditions, and a rich blend of musical influences that have converged under a rigorous communist regime to create this unique genre. Meanwhile, the agents, including the artists and Buddhist followers, constantly negotiate their collective identity and attempt to maintain spirituality within the multi-dimensional field of power. Such a field of power is composed of predominant Han cultural capitals, communist orthodoxy, as well as religious, cultural, and ethnic policies issued by the central government of the PRC.

This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on popular music and cultural studies beyond the West, the secularization of religious music in China’s social life, and the PRC’s political impact on Chinese musical activities.