Xuan Ye works across art, music and technology. X is interested in noise as a generative space to evoke the dissonant, untranslatable, and illegible within more-than-human entanglements. Their processes often involve improvisation and computation to compose software, images, installations, performances and editions.
Ye’s recent solo exhibition was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto in 2022. Their work has been exhibited internationally at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai), Venice Architecture Biennale, Peer to Space (Berlin), Fonderie Darling (Montreal), Varley Art Gallery of Markham, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Inside-out Art Museum (Beijing), the Goethe-Institut (Beijing), among others. Ye’s multifaceted practice has been featured and reviewed in Canadian Art (Winter 2020), ArtAsiaPacific (Issue. 111), KUNSTFORUM (Bd. 257) and Musicworks (Issue. 136). They were an artist-in-residence awarded by the Swiss Arts Council in 2023, a finalist of EQ Bank digital artist awards in 2018, and a recipient of scholarships and grants from all three levels of arts councils in Canada and the SSHRC.
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!
