The chanting machine
nianfoji
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This is a interacted story that lives inside a modified nianfoji — a mass-produced electronic chanting player made in Shenzhen since the 1990s, sold as a sacred commodity whose looped voice purifies a room.
A daughter comes home to repair herself, and finds that her mother's chanting machine has broken too. As she works on the machine, she moves through the rooms of the apartment and the objects in them, piecing together a story of the family, the city, and the machine itself.
This work asks how meaning is given and lost as an object passes from hand to hand, and listens for the women's labour underneath the spiritual surface of the machine.
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Yu Yin / Waneu · XPUB, Piet Zwart Institute · 2026