Xuan Ye 叶轩 (a.pureapparat.us) is an artist and musician. They make multimedia installations and performances, synthesizing language, code, sound, body, image, data, light, and time. Their work concerns the untranslatable and the more-than-human entanglements through various technologies, straddling improvisation and computation.
Ye’s work has been presented at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai), the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Venice Architecture Biennale, Peer to Space (Berlin), Fonderie Darling (Montreal), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Inside-out Art Museum (Beijing), the Goethe-Institut (Beijing & Montreal), Canadian Art (Winter 2020), ArtAsiaPacific (Issue. 111), KUNSTFORUM (Bd. 257), among others. They are an artist-in-residence awarded by the Swiss Arts Council in 2023, a finalist of EQ Bank digital artist awards in 2018, and a scholarship recipient from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
As a musician, Ye is techne agnostic and genre eclectic. Their music often experiments with free improvisation with prepared instruments and vocal techniques, computational randomness, algorithmic instructions, amplification and feedback, the noise of the field, hybrid chaos of bodily gestures and mediated bio-electrical currents. Their LP xi xi 息息 (Halocline Trance, 2019) is an “intriguing debut album of disjointed, abstract computer music and free improv” (Boomkat). Their split-collab tape Breath Fractals released with Chik White (Notice Recordings, 2019) “draws on a vocabulary of shattered sonics, as if the pair had broken a musical window and pieced it back together in as many ways as they could imagine” (Bandcamp Daily).
Lauded as “one of Canada’s most exciting voices in textural soma”, they have performed at numerous experimental music festivals and DIY shows, sharing programs with Phew, Pharmakon, Chris Corsano, Carl Stone, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Xylouris White, GOOOOOSE, etc. They have been commissioned by Edmonton New Music (2021), and the Canadian Music Centre (2020). They have collaborated with Canadian experimentalists Chik White, Jason Doell, Brigitte Bardon’t, Colin Fisher, etc. Their live performances and music releases have received critical accolades from Bandcamp, and Exclaim!
