Yue Luping , 'Echo of the Working Class'

Yue Luping's commission is a series of sound works staged within the decommissioned industrial zone on the Medway. It draws on the studio in which he now works, situated in Xian’s most famous complex of textile mills, most of which have now been decommissioned and where most of the workers have been ‘laid off’. Since the 1950s, when the political power of the proletariat was established in China, the workers have been the vanguard of the proletariat and have enjoyed an elevated position in Chinese society. The work addresses Britain's position as the place in which the Industrial Revolution first burst forth - it is also the place in which Marx advanced his theory of the Revolution of the Proletariat - and links the voices of redundant Chinese workers from Shaanxi Province with the passersby of the Kentish Medway.

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