Sound art and attentive listening to nature in Hong Kong: Retuning with ecology under the sonic turn

Contemporary sound practices in Hong Kong are often perceived primarily through their engagements within urban environments and human-produced sounds (anthrophony). While these elements are undeniably present, this article argues that sound art by Hong Kong-born or Hong Kong-based artists, is epistemologically, ontologically, and axiologically more deeply connected to nature than has been recognized. Through an ecocritical framework oriented to exploring human–nature interrelations, attentive listening to natural sounds, and the role of field recordings in these processes, I propose that sound artists provide an alternative, ‘less urban’ understanding of the city. Drawing on close analyses of selected works, exhibitions, and curatorial practices, and situating these within the wider field of sound studies, I conceptualize these interrelated tendencies as ‘retuning with ecology’. Retuning encompasses the recognition of natural sounds and their significance across artistic forms, past and present; the transcultural and transnational practices of artists whose engagements unfold within multiple ecosystems; the capturing of the sonic diversity of Hong Kong’s biosphere; and through attentive listening, a cognitive shift towards an understanding of sound as an embedded and co-constitutive factor of Earth systems. This approach is more closely aligned with the territorial reality of Hong Kong and its ecological conditions because it is less anthrophonic.