Little Dragon Soup
小青龍湯
“Little Dragon Soup” is an exchange between experimental music and Chinese medicine initiated during a commission by Ting Shuo Hear Say. The project involves theoretical study, compositions and conversations concerning herbal powers, emotional modulation and the methods of attuning the body.
The dragon submerges into turbulent waves to ease troubled waters. The dragon as cinnamon twigs, as ephedra, as peony root, as dried ginger, as asarum, schizandra, penillia and a dash of honey-fried licorice. An aromatic recipe that is at the same time mythological, medicinal, and revealing of a cosmological order, and in this world, a performative score is vivid, ambiguous yet tangible, constantly changing, guided by a calculation of botanical powers, a dynamic design to restore estranged morality, to qualm an emotional flooding in the lungs, to shudder the sorrow that sprouts in stagnated waters, to keep dexterity and flow and mobility of life. A view of the body, in which forms are implicitly inferred to by relationships, resonates with a specific kind of expanded listening first introduced to me by a Chinese medicine shop owner, who offers poetry as his preferred form of remedy after intuited reading of one’s emotional and physical body. A key term here is wen (聞), a rather open sensory concept that is fundamental in traditional clinical practices—to smell, to hear, to intuit, to catch wind of. Little dragon soup is an exercise of abstract scoring, sound, and kinetics that speak to the body as a micro-universe.
“The study of Chinese medicine embodies a holistic view of the human body that stresses on constant transformations, connections and changing dynamics. It utilizes language that is often inferent or allegorical to describe material associations, energy potential and power relationships. In this suggestive environment, the physical, emotional and metaphysical are discussed as one organic system. 3000 years of clinical experience, material experimentation, diverse philosophical trends, and socio-political interests have contributed to its complex theories on the human body. Anthropologist Anhua Zhang writes in her book Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine, the Chinese term for the body (身體) generally refers to both the physical and extraphysical... [it is] capable of feeling, preceiving, and resonating or embodying changes...[the body is] at the same time emotional, moral, aesthetic and visceral.”
--Excerpt from “Little Dragon Soup booklet” (2019)
The dragon submerges into turbulent waves to ease troubled waters. The dragon as cinnamon twigs, as ephedra, as peony root, as dried ginger, as asarum, schizandra, penillia and a dash of honey-fried licorice. An aromatic recipe that is at the same time mythological, medicinal, and revealing of a cosmological order, and in this world, a performative score is vivid, ambiguous yet tangible, constantly changing, guided by a calculation of botanical powers, a dynamic design to restore estranged morality, to qualm an emotional flooding in the lungs, to shudder the sorrow that sprouts in stagnated waters, to keep dexterity and flow and mobility of life. A view of the body, in which forms are implicitly inferred to by relationships, resonates with a specific kind of expanded listening first introduced to me by a Chinese medicine shop owner, who offers poetry as his preferred form of remedy after intuited reading of one’s emotional and physical body. A key term here is wen (聞), a rather open sensory concept that is fundamental in traditional clinical practices—to smell, to hear, to intuit, to catch wind of. Little dragon soup is an exercise of abstract scoring, sound, and kinetics that speak to the body as a micro-universe.
“The study of Chinese medicine embodies a holistic view of the human body that stresses on constant transformations, connections and changing dynamics. It utilizes language that is often inferent or allegorical to describe material associations, energy potential and power relationships. In this suggestive environment, the physical, emotional and metaphysical are discussed as one organic system. 3000 years of clinical experience, material experimentation, diverse philosophical trends, and socio-political interests have contributed to its complex theories on the human body. Anthropologist Anhua Zhang writes in her book Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine, the Chinese term for the body (身體) generally refers to both the physical and extraphysical... [it is] capable of feeling, preceiving, and resonating or embodying changes...[the body is] at the same time emotional, moral, aesthetic and visceral.”
--Excerpt from “Little Dragon Soup booklet” (2019)
Little Dragon Soup, herbal medicine, looped sound, 2019
Little Dragon Soup Script, herbal medicine, 2019
The dragon submerges to qualm troubled waters, herbal medicine on paper, ritual plants, 2019