composer / intermedia artist

What compels me to compose is the potential to create performance spaces that cultivate perceptual transformation. As a composer, I am coming to realize the significance of listening and raising our aural awareness to understand our sonic environments. The soundscapes may encompass all aspects of animate communities including the local landscape, deep earth, the biosphere, the moon, and the cosmos. I meditate on performance as an embodiment of such animate beings which are interconnected with each other on physical and metaphysical levels. For performers and audience alike, I think this embodied enactment of our habitat can be a powerful medium to foster a sustainable, reciprocal, and harmonious relationship between the human and non-human species. Moreover, I contemplate performance spaces to enrich directness in perception. When we engage in spatial and temporal dimensions of music and let it soak in without thinking about its meaning, it requires us to let go of any filter for analysis or interpretation. In such moments, we recognize the power of music to liberate ourselves to experience whatever emotions surge naturally. I think this impulsive surge of emotion has a transformative power to energize our inspiration and life force.

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I believe that what we experience in our daily life takes place beyond our physical bodies and in other energetic dimensions at the same time. During my compositional process, I visualize the physical and mental states of the players along with the resulting sound production. I think about the conscious enactment of sound by inviting the performers to experience subtlety, intimacy, and vulnerability. I am interested in composing scores that are invitational, sensorial, and contemplative. The integration of improvisation is inherent in my approach to cultivating an instinctive embodied expressions through sounds. The scores I write often emerge in combination of text and graphic supported by conventional notations so that they function as invitations for musicians to openly interpret. 

Furthermore, my works often call for multiple possibilities of realization not only in content but also in context of the performance. I am interested in exploring the environment where the piece gets performed and its relationship to the listeners. From a socio-cultural and economic view, the conventional venue of “concert hall” has a vivid structure among the audience and architectural division between the performer and audience. I question this framework which is deeply rooted in the Western anatomy of classical music upon putting my composition into this performance context. I am interested in cultivating  a curatorial practice as a composer to challenge and create an inclusive and participatory performance space that breaks the boundaries of economic, social, and physical status. In other words, besides my concern in contemplating the performers’ human behavior and interactions as a composer, I would like to recognize the social interaction between the performer and the audience as well as between individual audience members. As this composite relationship co-exists in the performance space, I find interest in blurring the boundary between performer and audience. This shift of positionally converts the role of the “audience” into a listening participant which emphasizes participation over spectatorship. This is an ongoing exploration of my recent works on how to impose a creative and intimate agency for the audience. The agency may be unvoiced, invisible, and realized without a drastic action but I aspire to invite each participant in the performance space, regardless of the role in music-making or listening, into a collective perceptual experience.