Going beyond music

Du Yun, US-based musician. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Du Yun landed in Shanghai, the city of her birth, two weeks after winning the Pulitzer Prize for music with her opera Angels' Bone. She was there to participate in the cross-disciplinary art event Shanghai Project on April 22.

Shanghai Project is a contemporary art initiative started in 2016 as "an experiment, a laboratory for testing the boundaries of existing assumptions". An exhibition entitled Seeds of Time opened at the Shanghai Himalayas Museum on the same day, which marked the beginning of the Shanghai Project Chapter 2.

At the exhibition opening, Du worked with pianist Huang Jianyi and a group of elderly amateur performers of Huju Opera－a local Shanghai opera popular in the region－from local communities to present a musical dialogue between East and West, and past and present, in front of visual digital projections created by architect Thomas Tsang.

It was a short performance of seven minutes, and Du wanted to bring to attention the authentic folk opera and dialect of Pudong in suburban Shanghai, as well as the plight of the elderly in the community.

Young people today often turn away from folk operas because they don't like their sounds, says Du. But presenting it at a visual-art exhibition allows audiences to listen as long as they are interested, she explains.

In the past few years, she has presented live performances at a wide range of triennial and biennale events, often collaborating with the likes of visual artists and poets.

Explaining the rationale behind her performances, Du says that it is sometimes a big commitment for viewers to buy a ticket, enter a theater and sit for a full-length concert or dramatic production. But at an art event, with her shows, "you can always leave if you don't like it.

"But if you stay a while and listen on with an open mind, you may find it interesting and even fall in love with it."

The 39-year-old musician was recognized by the Pulitzer board for her creation of Angels' Bone, a bold operatic work that "integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world".

Angels' Bone premiered at the Prototype Festival in New York last year.

And the review in The New York Times calls her creation "appallingly good" and said that her music "obeys only her own omnivorous tastes and assured dramatic instincts".

Speaking about the performance, which tells about two fallen angels exploited and enslaved by a couple yearning for money and fame, she says that some people may not be aware, but human trafficking happens all over the world.