Feast your senses with a novel ink art and new music experience
- Asian Premiere of ‘Ink Art & New Music: New Works by Faculty and Student Composers’ on 30 September, 8pm, at Grand Hall of Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre, Centennial Campus, HKU
- Featuring seven new works for mixed Chinese and Western instruments inspired by the Ink Art Collection of M+ Museum
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Get set for an evening of multisensory experience of the musical and visual arts on 30 September at HKU. Aspiring young talents of Ensemble Traversée will perform seven novel, cross-genre, cross-cultural, and cross-generational works composed by three faculty composers and four outstanding student composers. Hailing from The University of Hong Kong (Prof. Chan Hing-yan, Austin Leung, Jing Wang), South China Normal University (Dr. Yeung-ping Chen), The Tianjin Juilliard School (Dr. Yiwen Shen) and the Bard College Conservatory of Music (Samuel Mutter, OGA), they broke new ground by composing for mixed ensemble of Chinese and Western instruments that respond to their selected ink artworks from M+.
Breaking new ground with young talents
The genesis of the year-long multi-party collaboration ‘Ink Art and New Music’ Creative Exchange Project started back in 2018 when Prof. Chan, Dr. Chen, Dr. Robert Martin (former director of the Bard Conservatory), Dr. Jindong Cai (director of the US-China Music Institute), Dr. Lesley Ma (former curator at M+ and current associate curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Sharon Lu (programme director of HKU MUSE) met up in Hong Kong. “Ink art and Chinese musical instruments are part of Chinese culture with a long history; both need to find a contemporary voice. So we came up with the idea to create new music with a mixed ensemble featuring a very unique combination of instruments that responds explicitly to specific ink paintings. It has never been done before,” explains Prof. Chan.
Divided into three phases, the project eventually kicked off in September 2021 under the auspices of the HKU MUSE series, whose mission is to inspire a life-long passion for the arts through innovative and educational programmes. Run by the HKU Cultural Management Office, HKU MUSE has presented many innovative educational programmes. They include the Literature X Music Series with Musical Pushkin and Musical Murakami, a special project to commemorate 80 years of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, a crossover musical dialogue between the harpsichord and zheng, and a book on ‘late style’ published by Oxford University Press.
Held in Hong Kong, phase one comprised four virtual lectures on composing for mixed ensembles inspired by ink art delivered by Dr. Lesley Ma and the faculty members to their four mentees. Four lectures were also held for the public.
Phase two was a two-day conference held at the Bard Conservatory in New York in April 2022, where the new compositions by the students and their mentors were also premiered by the student musicians there.
Back to its place of origin
On 30 September 2022, the third phase and finale of ‘Ink Art and New Music’ will return to where it all started. Looking forward to the project’s culmination, which also highlights the importance of mentorship, Prof. Chan (mentor of the Bard students) gives a preview of the concert. “There will be two sections, the first showcasing the students’ works and the second the mentors’ compositions. Before each section, M+’s curator of Hong Kong Visual Culture Tina Pang and I will chitchat for about 10 minutes. She will talk about the background of the selected ink paintings and share her insights, while I will focus on how the composers use those paintings as a point of departure and how the music will reflect certain elements of the paintings. We will project the painting while the piece is being played. It will be very educational.”
Hear the art, see the music
![Lui Shou-kwan’s ‘Autumn 1964’ - an inspiration for Prof. Chan Hing-yan’s commissioned work. Lui Shou-kwan. ‘Autumn 1964’, 1964. ink and colour on paper, overall: 76.8 × 133.5 cm image: 58.4 × 84.6 cm. M+, Hong Kong. [2014.76]. © Helen C. Ting. Photo: M+, Hong Kong](https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto/sites/default/files/styles/660w/public/d8/images/2022/09/08/last 2 photo.jpeg?itok=aJC5iO2Q "Lui Shou-kwan’s ‘Autumn 1964’ - an inspiration for Prof. Chan Hing-yan’s commissioned work. Lui Shou-kwan. ‘Autumn 1964’, 1964. ink and colour on paper, overall: 76.8 × 133.5 cm image: 58.4 × 84.6 cm. M+, Hong Kong. [2014.76]. © Helen C. Ting. Photo: M+, Hong Kong")
Prof. Chan’s own composition – An Ink Artist’s Two Seasons – was inspired by the abstract Autumn 1964 and Winter 1968 painted by the trailblazer in Chinese art and leading figure in the New Ink Art Movement in Hong Kong, Lui Shou-kwan. “His paintings rang a bell in me because I came from a Chinese music background. He was looking for a contemporary voice for ink art like I for my instrument erhu.” He picked a combination of erhu, violin and percussion for this piece.
The most riveting and challenging performance of the evening would most likely be mentee Jing Wang’s Trace. The composer currently conducting her PhD research in composition at HKU under Prof. Chan responded to Li Yuan-chia’s Untitled painted in 1960. Mentored by Dr. Chen for this project, Wang selected the guzheng, percussion and cello for her innovative piece using different techniques written in graphic scores. The performance will start with the cellist drawing the strokes of the Chinese character Sù with her bow, transforming the conceptual painting moves into performative language and forming a visualised acoustic work. The percussionist will do likewise. “I would like the audience to find something that inspires them in this piece. I used my own sound textures, and I hope they will find their own. Everyone will have a different view, with someone finding the trace point of the artistic process in the piece’s middle, end or beginning.” And with the performance running anywhere between eight and 20 minutes long, depending on how the musicians control the flow, there is every chance they will find it.