In Half Sound, Half Philosophy, Jing Wang presents an account of contemporary Chinese sound art and electronic and experimental music while proposing an understanding of these forms through ancient Chinese philosophy. Wang traces sound art to China’s contemporary art since the 1980s, surveying works of performance, installations, public art, new media, and conceptual art. Regarding art music, she starts with China’s critical responses to electronic music beginning in the 1950s while detailing the development of synthesisers and the introduction of electronic music in conservatory training during the subsequent two decades. Laudably, she supplements this official art music with an analysis of related trends in underground and popular music. Although Wang considers the trajectories of sound art and music in China separately—with corresponding chapters dedicated to the history of each domain—the book’s aim is to bring them together in arguing that both resonate with the ancient Chinese concept of qi.

Qi stands for a kind of resonance common to life, matter, nature, and music. Through Wang’s extensive historiography of premodern Chinese philosophy and cosmology, we learn that qi is a vital force that emphasises “correlationality, resonance, process, and transformation” (12). Qi both produces and is a manifestation of sound. Wang briefly compares sound as qi to various contemporary sound theories, while she posits her understanding as an alternative to the nature/culture dichotomy found in recent sonic materialism frameworks. Instead, according to Wang, qi-thinking links nature and culture to the innate creativity of the cosmos while also facilitating a more earthly politics of power. She discusses the latter in Chinese sound art’s various references to cybernetic “anti-control,” as well as in ambience and anti-monumentality as potential sites of resistance to state power.

The book is organised into six chapters that follow a short introduction in which Wang lays out the book’s premise and summarises each chapter. Chapter 1 provides a close study of qi from the perspectives of ancient Chinese philosophy and acoustics along with various modern interpretations and debates. This fascinating material presents a significant departure, as Wang notes, from much of the extant literature on sound and sound art. Yet rather than the comparative “recontextual[isation of] sound studies” (7) that she signals in the introduction’s chapter summary, the chapter unfolds as more of a stand-alone primer on the philosophy of qi. Here, and in a few other sections, this theoretical material felt somewhat disconnected from Wang’s rich artistic analyses, even though she makes more explicit such connections between theory and practice later on.

Shifting from ancient Chinese philosophy, chapter 2 provides a genealogy of sound in China’s contemporary art. This section charts artists’ various uses of sound through descriptions of several key exhibitions and artworks since the 1980s. These descriptive interpretations of individual works by artists such as Yan Jun, Lu Lei, and Chen Zhen are really where Wang’s book shines. In addition to public art, new media, and performance, Wang explores artistic tensions between the conceptual and the sensory. Sound is of course a sense, yet art—and especially contemporary art—invariably works with ideas. Here a reader may wonder how Wang’s engagement with qi would figure in this question of sensory material versus concept—especially given its prevalence in recent sound art debates. She eventually returns to qi in the second half of the book. First, however, chapter 3 offers a detailed history of electronic and experimental music in China.

Wang’s approach is refreshingly integrative and inclusive, as the respective chapters dedicated to contemporary art and music might already suggest. Here Wang does not define sound art in opposition to music. Rather, she provides multiple disciplinary routes to the artistic use of sound in contemporary China. This is a welcome distinction given the tendency in recent scholarship to more cleanly demarcate the domains of sound art and art music, despite their complex historical interrelations. As noted, Wang augments her treatment of art music with nonacademic music. In terms of geographical inclusivity, she considers artists and musicians from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong along with a number of artists living abroad.

Chapters 4 and 5 return to the ancient Chinese philosophical concepts outlined in the first chapter while introducing two new ones. Specifically, chapter 4 applies the notion of shanshui thought—a unique meeting of qi and the notion of landscape—to the experimental music of Li Jianhong and Shen Piji. Similarly, chapter 5 characterises the interdisciplinary performances of artist/composer Lin Chi-Wei in relation to the shamanistic, while paving the way for her final chapter on the politics of control, cybernetics, and governmentality.

Overall, Wang provides a fascinating study of contemporary sound practices in China with multiple points of departure including aesthetics, politics, history, and philosophy. This expansive, interdisciplinary work represents a valuable contribution to the often more culturally and geographically restricted purview of many Anglo-American and European surveys of contemporary art, postwar music, and related sound practices.