| Before making Heartfelt Wishes, I experimenting with sounds, like simulation of voices in the environment. Later I thought of imitating the sound of a heartbeat with my own voice, and then I asked a group of people to imitate the sound made by the person before them. This is how the piece was completed. Heartfelt Wishes is about conveying the sound of the heart beating. The process turned a person’s voice imitating the sound of a heartbeat into, at the very end, a cursing phrase, “Ta ma qian zou,” meaning “Your mother needs beating.” It is a process similar to that of making a sculpture. Because the sound of a heartbeat was expressed by different people, the end result was unexpected. | 
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Zhong Jia-Ling
Zhong Jia-Ling, Heartfelt Wishes, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.
Before making Heartfelt Wishes, I experimenting with sounds, like simulation of voices in the environment. Later I thought of imitating the sound of a heartbeat with my own voice, and then I asked a group of people to imitate the sound made by the person before them. This is how the piece was completed.
Heartfelt Wishes is about conveying the sound of the heart beating. The process turned a person’s voice imitating the sound of a heartbeat into, at the very end, a cursing phrase, “Ta ma qian zou,” meaning “Your mother needs beating.” It is a process similar to that of making a sculpture. Because the sound of a heartbeat was expressed by different people, the end result was unexpected. It was affected not only by communication among people but by their assumptions of what they had heard. I have realized that this assumption is the manifestation of human beings’ anxiety and doubt.
The point of the installation is not to attract any attention. It should be disguised as a wall in the museum. There are three black holes that play, on loop, three different sets of recordings. In order to hear the sound, viewers must put their ears as close to the black holes as possible. The hole on the left plays the sound of a heartbeat; the hole in the middle plays a recording of the entire process, where each person imitated the sound the previous person made; the hole on the right plays what the very last person said, “Ta ma qian zou.”
