TIME

06-17-23 ｜Music box sound installation｜2017

title: 06-17-23
size: 260 cm x 180 cm
Medium: Musicbox, paper, stainless steel, plexiglass, wood
Year: 2017

Hearing Time Within the Cycle

06–17–23 is a sound installation that responds to time, systems, and the rhythm of everyday life. Using a music-box paper strip as its medium, the artist transforms public holidays marked on the Hong Kong calendar into perforations, allowing time to be experienced not through sight, but through sound.

As the music box turns, low tones recur steadily, forming a continuous sonic axis that moves forward without climax or emotional emphasis. The sound simply returns, again and again—much like the ordinary rhythms of daily life that appear unremarkable yet never truly disappear. Most of the time, life unfolds within this background, shaped by systems and propelled by routine.

Within this restrained and almost neutral flow, certain holidays occasionally emerge as higher notes. Irregular and unpredictable, these sounds do not promise happiness, yet they introduce subtle shifts within repetition. Through them, time ceases to be a strictly encoded line and becomes a space reshaped by emotion, memory, and bodily perception. Here, the “holiday” transforms into an audible psychological tremor—an accidental romance within compression, a small margin of freedom that persists inside the system.

The music-box strip spans the years 2006, 2017, and 2023, linking holidays from an eighteen-year period that includes the past, the present, and the yet-to-be-experienced. Although the work was created in 2017, its sound points simultaneously toward past and future. Within the structure of the calendar, identical monthly configurations reappear at intervals of six or eleven years, revealing a cyclical form of time. Yet this cycle is never static: as eras shift, some holidays disappear while new ones emerge; and as many traditional festivals follow the lunar calendar, the melody retains subtle variations within its underlying order.

Life has not yet settled, while responsibilities continue to accumulate; time that truly belongs to oneself often appears only in fragments. The music box cannot fast-forward or skip ahead—it moves forward one perforation at a time, much like life itself, which can only be lived through, never bypassed.

06–17–23 offers no conclusion about time. Instead, between repetition and deviation, it leaves behind a moment that continues to resonate—allowing one to hear, within the cycle, a time that belongs to oneself.