The choor khuur is an endangered Mongolian bowed instrument made from skin, wood, and horsehair. Its sound is raw, unstable, and extraordinarily sensitive to touch, temperature, light, and the conditions of the surrounding space. A knife inserted beneath its bridge alters the tension of the strings, producing shifting microtonal fields that seem to tremble between voice, friction, memory, and disappearance.

​

Born and raised in Inner Mongolia, Anqi Liu approaches the choor khuur not as a preserved cultural artifact, but as a living and continually transforming body. Through performance, electronics, spatial sound, moving image, installation, and extended duration, she brings the instrument into contact with contemporary technologies and architectures of listening.

​

The project asks what it means to encounter a sound whose history has been interrupted. What happens when an instrument survives, but the social world that once sustained its knowledge is being altered or erased? Can performance become more than representation? Can it become a form of reanimation, refusal, and shelter?

​

Within the work, the choor khuur is at once an instrument, an archive, a wounded body, and an unstable acoustic ecology. Its fragility is never treated as nostalgia. Instead, Liu allows its instability to generate new forms. Bow pressure, skin resonance, environmental noise, electronic feedback, amplification, and microtonal drift become materials through which cultural memory can be heard not as something fixed in the past, but as something actively struggling, mutating, and continuing in the present.

​

Each presentation is responsive to its site. In a gallery or museum, the project may unfold as a live performance, sound installation, audiovisual environment, durational activation, artist talk, or a combination of these forms. The architecture does not merely contain the work. It becomes part of the instrument, shaping how resonance moves, gathers, fractures, and disappears.

​

This is not a reconstruction of a lost tradition. It is a contemporary artistic practice formed at the threshold between inheritance and invention, intimacy and historical violence, disappearance and return.