Voice to Voice

Voice to Voice is an interdisciplinary project combining field research, interviews, architecture, video installation, sound, and live performance to explore how contemporary society defines human value through labor and productivity. As the third chapter of the Value Trilogy, it extends the inquiry from the valuation of artworks and artists toward broader questions of self-worth, dignity, and professional identity.

Developed between 2022 and 2026, the project is grounded in more than eighty in-depth interviews conducted across China with people from diverse social and professional backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, office workers, service employees, delivery drivers, factory workers, and rural laborers. A specially designed mobile interview wagon served simultaneously as a research instrument, a sculptural object, and a public space for collective reflection.

The installation consists of six listening booths presenting twelve edited interviews, a contextual video tracing the project’s journey, the mobile wagon itself, and a live performance in which the wagon is transformed into a jukebox-like device activated by the audience. Through intimate encounters with personal narratives of work, pressure, ambition, and dignity, Voice to Voice creates a collective space for listening and invites audiences to reconsider how human value might be understood beyond frameworks of productivity and economic output.

Between 2023 and 2024, Wang travelled across China with a specially designed mobile interview wagon, conducting more than 80 in-depth interviews with people from a wide range of professions and social environments.

The installation brings together listening booths, selected interview-based audio-video works, a video installation, and the mobile interview wagon as a sculptural archive of the encounters that shaped the work.

In the live performance, the wagon becomes a jukebox-like device activated by the audience. Through this participatory mechanism, fragments from the research archive emerge as a collective listening experience between performer, audience, and recorded voices.