Futing is an interactive, site-specific, open-framed audiovisual practice which includes thematic sound installations, performance assembly of improvisational collaboration with the audience, installation, sound and digital sculpture.

Xuan Liu refines the symbolic rhetoric of ‘Listening’ from the posture of the ancient Futing Terracotta to capture the external and internal spaces through listening to tomb culture. Influenced by the concept of Futing, Liu focuses on the collective psychological dynamics driven by the desire for connectivity with the world and presents the phenomena of the materialisation and ritualisation of mental activity embedded in a multi-linear fiction of events and mediums.

The concept of ‘Futing’ body figure is also a trigger of the exhibition: GMF Project 3: UP TO THE GROUND.

About GMF: Glimmer Music Festival is an ongoing project founded by Xuan Liu and Hao Long which takes the form of a virtual music festival. Each round will be a site-specific project, around sound-oriented subjects GMF is pleased to present a group exhibition Up to the Ground, of works by artists Iris Garagnoux, Jing Chen, Hao Long, Maria Estabanell, and Xuan Liu. Cocurated by Hao Long and Mireia Carbonell, at the 55a Dean Street, W1D 6AG, location in London. Opening on November 23, 2021.

This show will provide an associative approach spanning the boundaries of time and space, through a discussion provoked by a ‘silent gesture’, the Futing terra-cotta figure appears intently crouched on the ground, side to side, listening to the audible sounds coming from underground. Endeavouring to depict the looming complexity of connection and division through inviting and caring: You must penetrate deeper into the ground to move up to the ground. Returning to the ground from underground. This show will provide an associative approach spanning the boundaries of
time and space, through a discussion provoked by a ‘silent gesture’, the Futing terra-cotta figure appears intently crouched on the ground, side to side, listening to the audible sounds coming from underground. Endeavouring to depict the looming complexity of connection and division through inviting and caring: You must penetrate deeper into the ground to move up to the ground. Returning to the ground from underground.

Futing lies within the spirit article of Chinese tomb culture, which refers to
objects and maids designed and manufactured specifically for the decedent. While death is silent, the question of why Futing is crouched over and sidelong listening still remains an enigma. Twice-over, in The Art of Yellow Springs Understanding Chinese Tombs, Professor Wu Hung draws on the imagery of sound when describing the state of tombs in the early twentieth century, before modern archaeology unfolded in China, that because of their ‘ominous’ associations, tombs were not usually treated as aesthetic objects in ancient China. Ancient writers were
invariably silent towards subterranean tombs, which consequently led to these spaces being hidden and silent in both facts and documents. (Wu Hung, 2015) Silence is tantamount to death collectively. humanistic psychologist Carl R. Rogers elevates the role of listening to the point where one feels human (self) again and deems, “There are many, many people living in the private dungeon today, people who give no evidence of it whatsoever on the outside, where you have to hear very sharply to hear that faint messages from the dungeon.”