"Mother Tongue" explores Cantonese’s tonal‑musical qualities. Mapping six main tones and three entering‑tone structures onto nursery rhymes.
Mother Tongue
Live performance by Bo Choy with Geraldine Snell
Mother Tongue invites audiences to explore the musicality of Cantonese as a tonal language. Subtle pitch shifts in Cantonese can entirely transform lexical meaning. In this performance, Bo Choy maps Cantonese tonal structures onto familiar nursery rhymes, reimagining their melodies through the sounds and tonal contours of Cantonese.
Since becoming a mother, Bo has become increasingly attentive to the unique sonic environment shaped by children’s toys and informal everyday play. Drawing from these intimate sound sources, Bo and Geraldine work with reimagined nursery-rhyme melodies and sounds generated by children’s toys to create a form of “naïve music”. The performance allows these materials to shift, interact, and develop in unexpected ways, creating moments of harmony, surprise, and playfulness. Through this interplay of sounds, the performance reflects on language, motherhood, and the untapped creative potential embedded within ordinary everyday sounds.
This performance is presented as part of Bloody Worm: Nomadic Bodies, Conscious Experience, and Embodiment Practice, a one-year process-driven curatorial project initiated by Yifei Tang. Supported by the Octone Foundation, the project launched in March 2026 at Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), featuring artists Bo Choy, Chan Ting and Cici Wu. Taking the “bloody worm” from shamanic ars magna as its core metaphor and methodological framework, the project examines how artists translate, reshape, and re-narrate lived experiences rooted in personal perception and historical-cultural genealogies, traversing multilayered cultural and contextual boundaries. Through cross-regional symposia, field-based research, and ongoing public practices, the project fosters an open, evolving, and long-term supportive network.
Performance starts at 15:00; reception follows until 17:00
Presented in collaboration with Octone Foundation and Mimosa House