Rhythms of the Unseen: From Nusantara to Crip Time

‘The Sound of Skin: A Happening’ breaks away from the typical film screening and talk formats of the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2025, offering a more engaging and dynamic experience. This one-night event transforms M+’s Horizon Terrace into an unexpected backdrop for an electrifying party. Jakarta-based musician and producer Wahono will weave improvisation into a live music performance, while the Hong Kong art collective c.95d8 will experiment with reimagining time.

Using electronic music as his main medium, Wahono crafts immersive performances that blend composed structures with serendipitous moments. His avid interest in electronic music began in his teenage years, prompting him to pursue higher education in music in the United States, where he was exposed to jazz improvisation. ‘They shaped us to serve a role in the music industry, but what I’m doing now is almost completely unrelated to what I studied,’ Wahono explains.

After returning to Indonesia, Wahono made a conscious effort to understand grassroots cultures in Nusantara, an Old Javanese term that refers to the region that encompasses the Indonesian archipelago and the Malay Peninsula. He prefers this term over ‘Indonesia’ because it is less state-orientated and more reflective of the thousands of languages spoken throughout the region. To deepen his understanding, Wahono travels frequently and dedicates time to researching recordings of specific kinds of music from the region. He views music as a living entity integral to people’s daily lives, shaping their understanding and perspectives of the world. Through his musical works, Wahono seeks to capture and channel a distinct energy flowing through the diverse societies of Nusantara. This interest in identity and heritage eventually led Wahono to work with archival materials and establish the experimental label Divisi62 in 2016.

As a creative practitioner who works with sound and music, Wahono seeks to make music that transcends genres and cultures, often incorporating aspects of jazz improvisation into electronic music. He has also discovered that both music and the lives of the Nusantara people are deeply influenced by improvisation—a message he believes will resonate with audiences in Hong Kong. In his live performance for M+, Wahono aims to push the boundaries of musical expression and connect with an audience attuned to diverse musical languages.

Just as Wahono reinterprets his native culture through the more inclusive term ‘Nusantara’, the Crip Art collective c.95d8 reclaims the term ‘crip’ to challenge mainstream perceptions of disability and affirm the identities of those often marginalised. Founded by Yeung Siu-fong, Thisby Cheng, and Bomb Lam—three Hong Kong friends who formed a ‘chosen family’—c.95d8 creates works rooted in the shared act of caring and resists conformity to Hong Kong’s mainstream art context. In addition to expressing disability, c.95d8’s artistic practice also incorporates intersectional themes such as nature and queerness. The initial ‘c’ in the name draws on the layered meanings of ‘crip’, ‘cyun’ (the Cantonese word for ‘village’), ‘chosen family’, and a ‘collective space’. Meanwhile, ‘95d8’ references the Cantonese slang ‘gau m daap baat’ that describes seemingly unrelated things juxtaposed together, aptly reflecting the collective’s diverse creative practice, such as spatial design, curation, performance, and zine-making.

The term ‘crip’ originally served as a slang for something easy or weak, but it was later reclaimed as a term of identity and empowerment during the disability rights movement of the 1960s in the United States. In Hong Kong, however, Crip Art comes more from self-reflection than activist movements, serving as a way to question, express, and explore personal abilities and experiences. In Chinese, the prevalent term for referring to disabled individuals often includes the character ‘caan 殘’, which conveys notions of incompleteness and deficiency. In response, c.95d8 reclaims the concept of ‘crip’ through the character ‘kyut 夬’, which becomes a representation for breakthroughs. Kyut can serve as a standalone character and a Chinese radical component that combines with other radicals to form words with diverse meanings, suggesting the limitless possibilities of ‘crip’.

Rather than limiting the concept of ‘crip’ to physical and psychological disabilities, c.95d8 aims to broaden it to include ‘a vulnerability and barrier that everyone has’, challenging the binary distinction between so-called disabled and non-disabled individuals. All of us inevitably become ‘crip’ when we get sick, grow old, and eventually die. For c.95d8, the concept of crip time also encompasses any non-normative experience of time. At M+’s Happening, the team will present an interactive performance that invites participants to explore how each person’s perception of time differs and how it shapes personal boundaries.

As the music fades and you walk away from the Horizon Terrace, you may gain fresh perspectives on national and ethnic identities and become more aware of the fluid boundaries between socially constructed norms and difference. By presenting two specifically commissioned works that bring the unseen or marginalised to the stage, Wahono and c.95d8 encourage a rethinking of our sense of belonging and the structures that define it.