Bicheng Liang and Yixuan Shao

Bleikr, 2020
Framed cyanotypes, sounds, transducers
10 x 9 feet

Bleikr, a collaboration by Bicheng Liang and Yixuan Shao, interweaves visual and sonic experiences in geologic time. It is a set of time-based sounding prints, consisting of twelve channels of spatialized sounds and thirty-one cyanotypes of wild landscapes of deserts and canyons.

"Bleikr" is an old Norse word meaning "pale or shining", which sets the origin for the English word "Bleak". 

In the work, images captured under broad desert light slowly emerge through the cyanotype printmaking process and earth tones of the dye, recalling a negative afterimage of the environment. These details along with lines, shapes, textures, and traces of the red marks in each print inform the recording and spatializing process of the natural sonic materials. While vibrations sweep back and forth across the surface, microscopic traces that were once blurry, drifting around our visual and aural horizon, are now entering into our awareness. The faded and the pale, the bleak and the nebulous, the grainy and the whispering, permeate throughout wild landscapes: tinnitus in absolute silence, steaming air and debris under the feet. 

Bleikr explores a poetic avenue toward a non-anthropocentric scale of time --- one that expresses itself no longer in terms of hours and minutes, but in the forms in the textures, shadows, and sounds of the environment. The temporal and spatial relationships among each print are mapped into the textures of the landscape ---from every grain of sand to every boulder, from every inch of the fissure to the deep movement of the Earth crust, traversing layers of materialities. Crossing the intersections of the material and sensorial, the visual, and the aural, Bleikr exhorts to reveal the fickleness of human beings in geologic time.

Bicheng Liang, born in China, now lives and works in New York. He received his Bachelor's degree in Fine Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and now he is an MFA candidate at Columbia University School of Arts.  

As an interdisciplinary artist, his work is multifaceted including large sculpture installations, photography, ceramics, and printmaking. He focuses on the subtle traces of time in the landscape and natural materials. Liang’s work has been exhibited at museums both nationally and internationally, including Curatorial Practice in School of Visual Arts, New York, CAFA Art Museum and Tsinghua University Art Museum, China; International Print Triennial Society in Krakow, Poland. Liang is the founder of the PRENTIS art platform that encourages interdisciplinary collaboration, information sharing, and communication for new emerging artists. He is also the co-founder of Alchemyverse Collective.

Born and raised in Tianjin, China, Yixuan Shao immigrated to the United States at the age of 15. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Composition at UC San Diego. She is currently a MFA candidate in Sound Art at Columbia University and the cofounder of Alchemyverse and Cheat of grass, collaborating across disciplines. She creates installation works to gauge the physical space while inviting the viewers to take parts with their own subjectivities. Her sculptures are inner sounds materialized in visual forms. Stretched out and slowed down in time and space, these objects speak their alter-egos in noise and silence —— two contradicting yet connected margins in soundmaking.

Yixuan’s works have been performed and exhibited at the Block Gallery, Arts Letters & Numbers, Spectrum, Wallach Gallery, The FRONT Arte Cultura,the Athenaeum Art Center, the Conrad Prebys Music Center, and the Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada, Mexico.