Taiwanese sound poet brings onomatopoeic performance to Busan, Seoul

Yang Yu-Chiao performs in Seoul in 2023. Courtesy of glimworkers, Typojanchi

By Jon Dunbar

• Published Mar 4, 2025 11:38 AM KST
• Updated Mar 23, 2025 1:32 PM KST

When Yang Yu-Chiao was studying at National Taiwan University, he was exposed to a recording of the Korean pansori play "Simcheongga," which has a passage in which the main character's blind father opens his eyes.

"The dramatic performance and intense vocal tension deeply captivated me, and from that moment, I became very interested in traditional Korean music and performance art," Yang told The Korea Times.

The inspiration he felt put him on a collision course with Korea, which he visited in 2023 to share his "Blackboard Scribophone" performance.

He's coming back this weekend to do three performances in Busan and Seoul.

But what can we expect out of this Taiwanese professional oral tradition and folktale narrator, interdisciplinary narrative artist and sound artist?

If you view a video of one of his past performances, you'll probably see him babbling incoherently while making marks on a chalkboard. This may be daunting for the uninitiated. Yang combines sound poetry, traditional folk storytelling, writing and vocal free improvisation.

"The theme of this tour focuses on locally created sound poetry," Yang said. "I will collect various sounds from places in Seoul such as Seoul Station, Samcheong-dong, Mullae-dong, Yeouido and more, and then experiment with writing sound poetry using onomatopoeic words in Chinese, Taiwanese and some Korean. Finally, I will combine the performance of these sound poems with blackboard writing and folk storytelling, paired with free improvisation in the performance."

Between 2012 and 2021, he wrote many poems using various self-created onomatopoeic words. In 2023, he published a polyphonic poetry collection called "Xi Xiang." The poems feature his word creations made by transcribing the sounds he heard around Taiwan, such as the sounds of the high-speed rail, the Xinguang Pier in Kaohsiung and Nanjichang Night Market in Taipei. He then performs these poems in a mechanical, minimalist manner.

"These poems and the writing process are my way of recording and remembering the sounds of these places," he said.

When he visited Japan late last year to perform his sound poetry, he also collected sounds from Tokyo and Sendai.

"I found this process to be extremely enjoyable: through sound recording and onomatopoeia writing, I was able to use my auditory experience to document my own visual, tactile and travel experiences," he said. "In this way, a distant foreign land, through writing and performance, becomes connected to my body, through my (inner) ears and my fingers."

When he performs, he describes his mental state as similar to, but also somewhat different from, a shaman's trance.

"When I tell folktales, it feels as though I lose my own identity — even though my voice seems full of character — and it feels like I have no gender — the voice will subtly change with the storyline and characters," he said. "When performing, I feel as if the sounds of the real world are very distant from me, as if I'm floating high above, watching myself perform before the audience.

He traces this experience back to his youth, playing alone in his room.

"When I was in elementary school, I didn't have friends of the same age, so I would often spend time alone in my room, playing multiple roles by myself to perform a story or a fictional hero’s journey," he said. "What I found strange as a child was that I never specifically memorized these stories, yet I was able to speak the characters' dialogues fluently in real time. As I grew older and conducted some fieldwork, eventually becoming a storyteller in oral traditions for many years, I observed my own state: my mind would go blank, I would maintain a sense of transparency in my body and allow my body to act as a transparent, smooth pipeline, letting the story flow naturally through me, spilling out through my mouth. It was only later that I realized that many traditional storytellers performed in this way. They didn’t memorize the stories; instead, they allowed the 'flow of the narrative' to move through a transparent, free-flowing body."

For those attending one of his performances, he assures them not to be afraid of any language barrier issues. While he admits that understanding Chinese might add some enjoyment to the level of the story's meaning, he says the main focus of this work is actually the interplay between "the sounds of language" and "the lines of writing."

"Listening to my performance does not require any preconditions. While the process of 'hearing the language but not understanding it' may make some audience members curious or anxious, in the end, it simply melts into a lava of linguistic sound," he said. "The audience will hear me produce sounds that resemble various tools or devices. I might insert sentences that seem to have meaning among hundreds of onomatopoeic words. But ultimately, these sound poems will transform into different onomatopoeic expressions with various rhythms, appearing in the space, accompanied by free improvisation and vocal extension techniques."

He added that during his performances in France and Sweden, he found that children were able to follow what he was doing, comprehend the plots and the sound effects, as well as come up with their own interpretations, even though they didn't understand the language he was using.

The use of a chalkboard adds another unique element to his already unique performance. As he speaks, he draws lines on the blackboard, which he says "delay" the disappearance of the sounds.

"In the old classrooms, it was common to find blackboards that couldn't be completely wiped clean. On these blackboards, I often saw traces that might have come from the last class, the previous semester or even from years ago. These marks were at once vague and yet clearly distinguishable. Interestingly, many of these blackboards had quite complex mathematical symbols written on them, almost as if the blackboards were dreaming — a dream of mathematical proofs," he said.

"I deeply appreciate this quality of blackboards — the way the writing and symbols can never remain permanently but also don’t vanish in an instant. The writing on a blackboard has a natural quality of 'delay,' moving slower than our thoughts, and its disappearance — unless we clean it too thoroughly — is slower than our forgetting. In this sense, a blackboard resembles the brain of a specific era — an artificial storage device. It forms a kind of contrapuntal arrangement, which was one of my favorite themes during my studies in music theory. It also reminds me of how ancient stories don't completely fade before new ones begin to emerge."

For this tour, he'll be bringing his "blackboard bricks," which are specially designed, providing the right sizes that he can bring with him in his luggage on tour.

"I will prepare one or two different sound poems for each performance, depending on the characteristics of the space, the temperature and humidity of the day, the number of people present and so on. Even when performing the same sound poem at different venues, the writing on the blackboard and the oral sounds will vary, as they are influenced by the free improvisation involved."

Yang will perform in Seoul, first at Dotolim on Friday and then Yogiga on Saturday, before heading to Void (0) in Busan on Sunday. At these performances, he will also engage in free improvisation experiments with local improv musicians Jin Sang-tae, Ian-John Hutchinson, Lee Han-joo and Pulsecom.

Those three artists also had a hand in setting up this tour for Yang.

"This tour is not only a beautiful coincidence but also the result of the help and support of many friends," he said. "These connections and friendships truly made me feel how vast the world is and how, through the window of friendship, we can connect to new opportunities in life."

Visit @vaeinaemoelnen on YouTube for more information and follow @yang_yu_chiao on Instagram.