Mingjun Yang is a sound artist whose practice explores the relationship between perception, sound, and the self. Her academic background in film sound design has made her particularly skilled at storytelling through sound and shaped her approach to constructing sonic narratives through timbre, spatial movement, and temporal structure. As her practice has developed, she has extended the narrative capacity of sound from telling external stories to revealing processes of perception, exploring how sound can provide a perspective for self-observation.
Her current practice examines how human presence, movement, stillness, and duration shape sonic environments and participate in the unfolding of internal states. Through spatial audio, interactive systems, and presence-based sensing, she maps observable bodily behavior onto changing sound states without assigning specific emotional meanings to them. Sound thus provides a third-person perspective through which individuals may notice changes taking place within themselves that might otherwise remain imperceptible.
Her practice is grounded in a philosophical framework of Being, Thought, and Becoming. Being refers to one’s existing internal state; Thought introduces movement, judgment, interpretation, and disturbance; Becoming is the process that gradually unfolds through their continuous interaction. Within this framework, perception is an active process that continually shapes how reality is experienced and how the self is understood.
She believes that beneath social structures in which everything may appear to have already been arranged, an individual’s inner orientation remains the creative force behind every unfolding story, as well as a possible way through the complexities of life. Her practice continually explores how individuals can consciously shift their perspectives and discover new possibilities within their relationships with themselves, with others, and with the world.
Her future work will further explore how individual perception interacts with personal experience, collective memory, history, and received systems of knowledge. She is also interested in how traces left by participants can accumulate over time to form evolving sonic and social structures. Across these directions, one question remains central to her practice: how can sound art preserve a perspective for self-observation, allowing people to reconsider their relationship with what appears to be objective and discover new possibilities for being?