Artist Statement
My work speaks to my experience growing up in Southern China, being rejected in Europe as an opera singer, and redeeming myself as a creative New Yorker. I believe I have a unique position that reinvents the legacy of opera to imagine an intimate and immersive future for performances.
I was born in Canton, Southern China where I was immersed in the culture of Taoism and Buddhism. This gave me rather strong eatern philosophical roots in relationships, disciplines, and mindfulness. Then I traveled abroad to London, UK wanting to study music technology initially but surprisingly ‘derailed’ to a journey as an opera singer in the birthplace of many historic operas, because of the unique voice type - male soprano - a soprano voice living in an Asian male body in my case. This has created an identity crisis during my performing career in Western Europe and eventually turned into rejections and failures. During this bitter time, I managed to stay sane with two ongoing questions - what is my voice trying to teach me and how can this experience inspire the world?
10 years later, I am pursuing my ‘music technology dream’ with a much more specific task in the US: exploring alternative models to the traditional concert or operatic performance. This includes creations of a hybrid performance that breaks the boundaries of physical acoustic space, place, collective experience, and large-scale, digitally-enabled accessibility.
At the intersection of performance, music, and virtual space, I collectively engage listeners in the healing experience of spatial-sonic performance art. Not only my international career as an opera singer and equally astounding experience as a vocal experimentalist, I realize an experimental and process-oriented nature fits my art practice the most led by cross-disciplinary approaches. I often like to collaborate with sound designers, game developers and coders expanding the notion of the opera’s potential by exploring accessibility through digital tools and how gender, voice, and space can be mediums of emotion.
I would like to take advantage of omni-channel spatial audio and digital design, and center this technology within the legacy of Castrati carried through a 21st century interdisciplinary Cantonese Male Soprano. I would like to act as a creative director inspiring design teams to cultivate spatial conceptions of vocal production and timbre, including breath, emotion, craft, and space. As a result, this will create an enclosure for my voice avatar to digitally house the live vocal performances, as well as streaming as a live metaverse experience on the web. It aims to uncover how to bridge the hybrid future of performing arts, fine arts, and technology.
