A Sino-French exhibition, "I Never Dream Otherwise than Awake: Journeys in Sound", is presenting 15 installations from the Centre Pompidou's new media collection alongside selected audio-visual works and sound sculptures from Chinese artists at Shanghai's West Bund Museum.

At the exhibition, one room is covered with balloons, horns, broken accordions and drums. An electric device combines these incongruous musical instruments and everyday objects. You can hear a precise musical score that contains a sense of humor and absurdity.
On a small installation, a rotating motor drives a magnet on a glass rod, attracting a large needle mounted in a bottle below, producing a subtle sound. Listen attentively to perceive the subtleties of the sound.

"Sound has always been a very important medium for me to understand the world. We have focused more on the sense of hearing, while also making certain changes to the environment," said Ye Hui, an artist.

The West Bund Museum in Shanghai and the Centre Pompidou in France have teamed up to present this exhibition. It delves into the expressive potential of sound, particularly its capacity to circulate, to be ubiquitous, and to set relationships.

"This collection was started in the 70s and was really open to the question of sounds. Hence the title 'I Never Dream Otherwise than Awake', which is actually inspired by the work by Emmanuel Lagarrigue, a French musician and artist. So this relationship between sound movement and dream is run through the exhibition," said Marcella Lista, head curator of the new media department of Centre Pompidou.
The exhibition brings together nearly 30 artists. Fifteen installations from the Centre Pompidou's impressive new media collection, alongside selected audiovisual artworks and sound installations from Chinese artists are being showcased.

"All these works are extremely different and fascinating. It's important to outline the fact that artists come from very different backgrounds. Some of them are musicians, composers, some are visual artists, and some come from literature. There's no such thing today as media specificity, you know, artists work with many mediums. And so, sound is really used by anyone," said Lista.

The exhibition runs through September 17. It is the latest collaboration of a five-year exhibition project from 2024 to 2029 between the two institutions. The previous five-year cooperation agreement attracted nearly 2 million visitors to the West Bund Museum.