During my time at Harvard since Fall 2024 (plus a semester in 2023), I have produced creative works, participated in productions directed by fellow students, and wrote etudes and papers to reflect on my creative process and inquiry. In this essay, I will talk about nine creative projects in detail and use them as entry points to examine how my artistic interests intersect and are in conversations with the broader artistic communities. I am hoping to unfold how I became who I am as an artist at this moment, and envision the possibilities of continuous evolvement in the near future.

 

I identify as a composer, a multi-instrumentalist, and a puppeteer. I used to stay away from the label “composer” due to its historical baggage and cultural narrative that is dominated by Western European classical music lineage. Sometimes this community uses the term “New Music,” which I find it entitled and problematic. This inclusive term implies any music that is new, but in most cases it is reserved for a specific aesthetics and cultural value that both the actors and the spectators (using Augusto Boal’s terms from his book Theatre of the Oppressed [1]) have to subscribe to, and often have to go through systemic training that is hierarchical, exclusive, and inaccessible in order to engage with this artistic style. The earliest documentation of my musical creation was on cassette tapes from when I was eight years old, and during the past two and a half decades, I have worked with and learnt from musicians and creators with different backgrounds. There was often a DIY nature to the learning, and I was fortunate to work with folks who function fluidly and think outside of the boxes and are supporters of my creative inquiries. My artistic interests also expanded beyond music. After writing scores for animation and theatre for years, I started to produce my own visuals and theatrical productions. I was influenced by journalistic approach and brought in psychological awareness when untangling difficult sociopolitical discourse. I was introduced to interactive technology and involved in conversations on ethics behind new media and technology. And I had my first interaction with puppetry when teaching at elementary schools and working at a children's museum. Puppetry has since become a prominent media and methodology in my creative work. During these years of explorations, I went from the confusion of “I am not an expert in one thing” to the affirmation of “I am an expert in weaving many things.” This also helped me embrace the label of composer again. In my own terms, I am a composer who composes music, visuals, words, puppets, technologies, and many other creative possibilities.

 

While it is hard to categorize, among the projects I focus on in this essay, the common themes include the use of puppetry, field recordings, intermedia storytelling; and many of them explore sociopolitical discourse, Asian American issues, and autoethnographic narratives. Here are the projects in chronological order:

 

1. Beauty Standards: an audiovisual installation with custom smart mirrors created in 2023 in collaboration with fellow sound artist Seiyoung Jang

2. Strawberry Creek Redefined: an audiovisual work created in 2023 and 2024 in collaboration with video artist Simona Fitcal

3. Multiverse: an intermedia work created in 2024

4. When water has perfect memory- Toffia: an immersive audiovisual installation created in 2025

5. Up in the Sky: a toy theatre music video created in 2025

6. SCDS: a narrative soundscape composition created in 2025

7. Duo band with fellow multi-instrumentalist Micah Huang, ongoing since 2025

8. Harajuku girls: an experimental podcast episode created in 2025

9. A Different Reality: a multiyear project between 2020-2026

 

In spite of the overlapping nature, I will talk about these works in four topics: 1) The Makings and Un-makings of Asian American Imagery; 2) Diverse Listening; 3) Worldbuilding; and 4) Liminal Play

 

The Makings and Un-makings of Asian American Imagery: Beauty Standards and Harajuku girls

Both Beauty Standards and Harajuku girls utilize masking as a method. In Beauty Standards, masking symbolizes the manipulation of Asian American imagery but also actions to reclaim self-image, while Harajuku girls use masking not only as a critique, but as glitches to unveil and break through a system.

 

Beauty Standards (2023)

Beauty Standards was created as a seven-minute audiovisual work premiered in Paine Hall at Harvard University in 2023, and was later repurposed into an installation to be exhibited at the Bibliowicz Family Gallery at Cornell University in 2024. My collaborator, sound artist Seiyoung Jang, and I wanted to create a work that speaks to us as Asian American women, and we are both interested in the role of technology in relation to Asian American representation. Concerned with topics such as self-esteem and self-images, I figured it could be effective to incorporate custom smart mirrors.

 

We recorded our faces with Snapchat’s filters and referenced gestures seen in commercials and TV news. These footage become video scores to prompt us with our sonic makings. We then built a standing frame with two-way mirror film panels, folded the frame in an angle to create an infinite effect, and projected our faces, masked by digital effects, onto the transparent panels. Instead of a fixed monitor behind each film panel, the projectors create more reflections of various sizes in the environment. Our faces look like phantoms staring at the participants while the participants see their images overlapping with these artificial faces. In the program note I wrote: “This installation comments on the politics behind beauty standards. Asian American women are often sexualized by the Western gaze, and Asian Americans’ images are hyper-racialized by intrusive technology, like face filters and AI. Through gazing at their artificial faces, the artists ruminate on the uncanny valley of generalized beauty standards. Through responding with electronic soundscape created by their own custom instruments, the artists are reclaiming their self-expression by giving their images new meaning.” [2]

 

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Harajuku girls (2025)

Harajuku girls is an experimental podcast featuring real-time improvisatory performance between AI chatbots and a human moderator disguised with an AI voice generator and a custom mask. This is the latest project where I engage with AI through a critical lens since 2022. Having explored how AI mirrors profiling, exploitation, and dehumanization of current systematic oppression, I focus on the objectification, specifically of Asian American women, in this project. In a seminar paper I wrote: “Days after xAI’s Grok antisemitism scandal in July 2025, the AI company launched two animated characters. The company calls them ‘companions,’ including a 22-year-old childlike gothic Lolita with blonde pigtails called ‘Ani’... Ani is an anime girl designed to flirt. It can strip down to be almost naked and initiate more sexually explicit content.” [5] Ani reminds me of Fook Mi and Fook Yu from the 2002 Austin Powers movie. Set to be identical twin sisters, the two Asian American actors who are not related “speak with an exaggerated fresh off the boat accent, wearing pigtails, childlike accessories, and a Harajuku-fashioned outfit that resembles school-girl uniforms with mini skirts that expose their underwear and butt cheeks. The characters act innocent but flirty, and are eager to please Austin Powers, played by Mike Myers, by showcasing their bodies and offering any kind of services, including sexual acts.” [6] Behind the fetish is an attitude that Asian women are interchangeable and disposable, which often manifests into extremely violent acts, such as the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings. “With a long-standing violent infrastructure against Asian/Asian American women, it is not surprising that a misogynistic AI companion girlfriend like Ani was set to be an Asian babe cooking in lingerie in the kitchen.” [7]

 

I have so many questions for those AI companions. Can I unveil how they were engineered by conversing with them? And since they are sealed and masked behind a fictional character, I would do the same too. I built a half-face character mask, a wig, and a face mask to cover my mouth. I then use an AI voice generator to bend my voice. I transformed myself into an anime-inspired male figure, whose name is Andy Neilson. In realtime, I interacted with ChatGPT, Grok AI, and Ani, chatting about today’s politics, Fook Mi and Fook Yu, and the Atlanta Spa Shootings. At one point, Grok AI seemed to get irritated and questioned why I asked those questions. Grok, voiced to be a gen-Z female, interrogated “is that because you are Asian?” Incorporating mask theatre allowed me to ask radical questions and stay emotionally stable when AI makes ignorant assumptions and offensive remarks.

 

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Diverse Listening: Strawberry Creek Redefined, When water has perfect memory, SCDS, and A Different Reality

In this section, I tackle the nature of listening. In my personal opinion, listening is an embodied experience that is intimately connected with diverse perspectives, circumstances, and wisdom. Among the four projects, there are compassionate listening to a place to observe its history, sociality, and ecology; critical listening to underrepresented narratives; as well as approaching listening from an aural representation as a counternarrative.

 

Since 2022, I have been listening to underwater soundscapes through hydraphones in nature including creeks, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Sometimes I listen to human-made environments such as fountains, pools, and ponds. From a series of writings on my relationship with water from a seminar with Jessie Cox, I reflected: “As a daughter of an island with multiple identities, water makes histories and symbolizes the fierceness of our ancestors. Located in a complex tectonic area, the island was born out of plate collision underneath the Pacific Ocean. The collision created steep mountains, giving the island a wide range of sceneries from Tropical rainforests to Polar climates. The waters enjoyed all forms— from solid ice, liquid water, to gas vapor, which births many local species that make the water environments their home. The island has many names, given by visitors, settlers, and immigrants. Most of us on the island lost trace of our lineage. When a small island has hosted Pacific Islanders since 3000 BC, witnessed the conflicts between Hoklo and Hakka immigrants, endured colonizers including the Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese, as well as navigated forces from Chinese nationalists and US Military Assistance Advisory Group, there are too many DNAs that are mixed in the conversation. It creates linguistic landscapes with 46 languages (and their own dialects) currently living on the island. It is difficult to keep track of all the names that people use to try to make sense of this place. The reality I grew up with is that this is a place called Taiwan, with a nickname Formosa, meaning beautiful island in Portuguese. And I identify as Taiwanese, whose ancestors migrated the mesmerizingly charming yet dangerous waters to breed a future.” For me, “if water sounds above ground is the spoken language, the underwater world would be its dialects. It is localized and reflects a peculiar ecology. I find it very revealing and intimate to get underneath the earth, as well as vulnerable and humble when listening to a world that I could not breathe in but can now breathe with.” [9] It is not surprising that when I am getting to know a place, listening to local waters becomes my intuitive approach. 

 

When water has perfect memory (2025)

In the summer of 2025, I arrived in Toffia, a remote medieval village in Italy as an artist-in-residence for a month. It was my first time visiting Italy. My Italian was elementary, and the residents in the village that faces demographic crisis are mostly elders who speak local languages. The sound of water was the compass that grounded me in this new environment– the slow drips in mossy fountains, waste water pouring out of pipes, thunderstorms at night, and noisy creeks in the bottom of the steep hills. I hiked into the woods and spent time with the rivers– which surprisingly were polluted by trash. There were broken furniture and electronics sitting in water that I later learnt from the locals that it was the aftermath of inaccessible hoops residents have to go through to legally dispose of larger objects. After two weeks of intentional and also spontaneous listening while holding a recording device that captured sounds from local events, mundane, as well as sound making on a rusty fortepiano and singing at a reverberant church, I created an audiovisual work that features “underwater footage from local rivers, audio recording (underwater and above-water), as well as stop-motion animation with found objects from the medieval village of Toffia.” [10] It was projected as an immersive environment onto the wall inside of a theatre which was converted from a 13th century church. Some locals were impressed by how the soundscape composition not only captures sonic scenes that they take for granted, but reflects the ethos that speak to their social life. As a guest in that space, water is the pivot point of building connection. Perhaps due to the universal yet locally fluid nature of water, it opens up a forgiving space to observe without coming across as invasive– metaphorically and literally speaking when engaging in cross cultural interactions.

 

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Strawberry Creek Redefined (2024)

In 2023, I was commissioned by Oakland-based non-profit organization Thingamagigs for their Redlined Redefined Interactive Map project [12]. Supported by California Council for the Arts, the commissioned artists untangle the history of redlining in the San Francisco Bay Area. My project focused on Strawberry Creek Park, located in a former redline neighborhood in central Berkeley, California. Having lived in the area, I am familiar with the soundscape: human activities on the grass, kids screaming in the playground, the gentle streams of the Strawberry Creek that runs through the park, and crickets at night. What I did not know was the rich history behind– for example, the park was built on a former Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (ATSF) freight train yard; the creek was home to the Huchiun-Ohlone tribe where people “had a spiritual connection with the body of water” and “would pray and sing to the water” [13]; and the park marked the first successful daylight project in the country. Yet, people still do not know much about the redlining– who were the residents, how was their lives, and what happened– just like much of the oppressed history that has missing puzzles. So how can I approach this discourse when not much is known?

 

I also wonder: when doing field recording, what could be the most objective result? I ran this question with Yvette Jackson, and she pointed out that none of the field recording is objective. Why there is a reason for recording in that moment at the specific location is already filtered through the person who initiated the recording– it doesn’t matter what is being captured. So how about approaching the recording as worldbuilding? The conversation inspired me to write down these prompts: “How does a body of water that carries a long history of human activities and social/environmental policies tell the story of a place? How reexamining the history of this park and its neighborhood could reflect the present? And how reimagining an alternative past through sonic worldbuilding can inspire an alternate reality (a future) of the neighborhood?” [14] I then did some video recording underneath the creek, recorded the water sounds, and I asked a friend who still lived in the area to help set up the recorder at specific locations to capture the soundscape in the park.

 

I teamed up with media artist Simona Fitcal, and I gave her the video footage I recorded. Rather than having a linear collaboration process, we started to create separately based on the information we obtained from our collective research. We reconvened after we had our first drafts, where Simona synced and redesigned her visuals inspired by my soundscape composition, where I built a world through the processed and unprocessed field recordings. I then responded to her video composition by adjusting and adding more materials. In our program note, Simona wrote: “the visual narrative is layered with abstracted footage of underwater hair, a metaphorical representation of submerged histories and the flow of time. The contrast between the sharp delineations of the neighborhood footage and the fluid, organic movement of the underwater hair reflects the tension between imposed boundaries and the natural, inevitable continuity of life and memory. Through this juxtaposition, the project invites viewers to consider how the remnants of redlining still ripple through communities today, affecting both the physical and emotional landscapes of those who have been historically marginalized.” [15]

 

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A Different Reality (2020-2026)

A Different Reality is a multiyear project that examines today’s world through the lens of a future generation. The project features narratives of five girls, all residing on the West Coast of the United States, and follows them every three years between 2020 to 2026.​​​

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Originally commissioned by National Sawdust in 2020 for their Digital Discovery Festival, I was paired with percussionist Ian Rosenbaum to create a three minute piece. I interviewed these girls in summer 2020, when they were 10 to 12 years-old. I asked them the same 25 questions that cover topics of recent events, self-identity, and their worldview. Six hours’ worth of interviews, conducted virtually through video calls, were examined and edited down to be incorporated into this three-minute work. The process was challenging in terms of decoding what were the concrete concepts and arguments kids in these ages would like to express. The narrative is the skeleton of the form, and inspires the musical elements including marimba and electronics. I recognize that my compositional process for this work was heavily influenced by my film scoring experience. I was concerned about how I could give out information that was not seen on the screen– in this case, what was behind the literal words– such as the emotions and foresee what was coming. Empathy is crucial. I wrote: “the music performance should embody not only the rhythm of the interviewee’s speech, but also the context of their narratives. Imagine that those interviewees are your duo partner. Breathe and interact with them. Internalizing the narratives is essential.” [17] To give equitable agency between the composer and the performer, I considered my role as a collaborator giving prompts and a director combing through general direction (or structured improvisation, as described by some) for the performer to interpret. For example, I would suggest rhythm and grooves where the performer can mix and match, but within a series of selected pitches as well as some fixed material where the performer has to sync with the narratives. The notation is a mixture of staff notation and text direction.

 

The project later received a grant from the New Music USA to expand its scale into multiple parts. I interviewed the same girls (with one of them missing) with the same 25 questions in 2023, this time all in person, when they turned 13 to 15 years old. The plan was to compose and premiere the second part in 2023, but due to unforeseen circumstances the production was paused. When the puzzles were picked up again, it was already in 2026. However, this offers an informative opportunity. Things change in three years including how I approach composition, and in this case especially how I notate music. By 2026, I had not notated music in staff notation for four years. And the notation software I used, Finale, went out of business in 2025 after 35 years of operation. Personally, notating music is a matter of what is the most efficient communication I can use in terms of symbols and medium. It includes but is not limited to texts, graphics, audio files, videos, puppet movement, screenshots of software workstation windows, and three-dimensional scores. It also depends on my collaborators– what artistic languages they speak and what are their comfortability with new expressions.

 

In the first part, I worked with Ian, who has conservatory training in classical marimba. As a founding member of Sandbox Percussion, Ian works with living composers and is open to new forms of notation. But staff notation is the most intuitive to him. I produced the score with Finale, with staff notation as the main skeleton but incorporated a lot of texts and theatrical directions. In the second part, I worked with Levy Lorenzo, who has a long history working with a diverse range of musical expressions. In this case, I created the score in Microsoft Word. Written in the format of a theatrical script but with staff notation, staff notation becomes secondary but is still an efficient component in the overall expression.

 

Five hours worth of interviews were edited down to be a four minute piece in the second part. Compared to the first part, the same elements include using the same mallets, a similar form, and same prepared notes where aluminum foils were installed underneath the marimba keys to create buzzing sounds that symbolize the interference from the external world. What was newly developed in the second part includes the introduction of new notes, the expansion of registrars, and more interference from the electronics track which reflects the kids’ uses of personal social media accounts and how those external voices begin to influence how they think and approach the world. In summer 2026, I will be following up again with these kids, who are now 16 to 18 years old.

 

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SCDS (2025)

As a kid, I hear things that many people don’t seem to notice. I heard the window hum before the sound of a flying airplane. I recognized each of our neighbors’ cars when they pulled into the apartment complex from our fourth-floor unit. I was a 100-meter dash runner in my high school team, and I remember the pounding of my heart and the amplified voice in my ears that would linger for hours after each training session. I told my aunt that sometimes I heard howling from beneath the earth right before an earthquake. She laughed and said she could hear those too. I often point out the sounds around, but people don’t seem to feel the same way. I was a kid with a wacky imagination. Sound, as a concept and as embodied experiences, amaze but also overwhelm me.

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In 2021, I moved to Upstate New York from California and had my first snowy winter. One night I was outside of a loud bar when all a sudden my ear buzzed and the world tilted. After that incident, I began to have puzzling experiences. Sound in my ears would get distorted when the environment is loud; I have a hard time hearing when people talk; sometimes I feel like I’m physically punched by some random sounds; I keep having a sensation that I’m on a rocking boat; aisles look like they grow and wiggle; and I get physically and mentally exhausted easily. I saw various ENT doctors. The hearing tests came back not only normal, but extraordinarily well. “You have amazing hearing,” as some would say. I eventually met a doctor who gave me a CT scan. A few days later, the hospital called. They found an opening in my inner ear, which indicated I have a condition called the Superior Semicircular Canal Dehiscence Syndrome (SCDS). This rare chronic disorder, which affects patients’ hearing and balance, could lead to gradual life-long hearing loss and vestibular issues. And people with this syndrome hear the world differently– often perceive sounds that would normally get filtered out cognitively. It’s like you found out you’re colorblind. But instead of losing the color palate, I see extra colors—but I have no reference what the extras are. I’ve been living in a parallel universe.

 

Partially out of an urgency to document what I had been taking for granted were actually not the reality to most people, and partially out of frustration of not being able to communicate my sonic reality to the doctors, I made a sonic documentary to recreate my experience with assistance from digital effects. I recorded some mundane activities and environments that often trigger my medical episodes. In the documentary, listeners would hear me hearing a sound source from the other side of the room, but it sounds like it was right in my ear. It also presents the perception of tinnitus and autophony, where I hear my inner body sounds like heart beats and breathings loudly. Due to the missing bone in the inner ear, it causes a third window effect where sounds reverberate with a metallic timbre. There is an interesting paradox: in order to make a hyperrealistic documentary I need to work with artificial effects. And what does it mean that the work is effective in terms of I would get triggered when listening to it, but when other people hear it they couldn’t experience a big difference? This work testifies the perception difference between me and others. Some peers suggested maybe it makes sense to bring in a collaborator to help produce a more accurate experience that I am expressing.

 

This work, initially meant to be pragmatic, bought up some rhetorical questions. When considering the diverse spectrum of listening, how diverse are we considering? To what extent would one be considered different or even disabled? Vijay Iyer had suggested in one of our conversations that people are all unavoidably becoming disabled at some point in life. So perhaps, disability is more about the gifted reality and wisdom that came out of life, rather than the things that we lose. And I think I can say the same when it comes to approaching listening from an aural representation, as a counternarrative.

 

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Audio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T2M0Gywto-52HjSYCc0sEwF8DnLFI815

 

Worldbuilding: Multiverse and Up in the Sky

Multiverse and Up in the Sky build speculative worlds through puppetry. Multiverse incorporates a full-size mask puppet, and Up in the Sky features a custom toy theatre.

 

Multiverse (2024)

Multiverse is an intermedia work that was driven by this curiosity: how can I create as many realities as possible in one shared space? To address this question, I brought in the perspectives of in-between realms and used intermedia as a method. I was interested in the concept of “portals,” and I wonder: “How can I transform a present place into an imaginative space from the past and/or from the future? Can I juxtapose the present reality with the imaginative realities?” [19]

 

To create an immersive experience with both the digital technology and the analog world, Multiverse features live green screen, projection, video, electronic music, mask puppet, and a live musician. Inspired by a Taiwanese Indigenous folk tale, the anthropomorphic figure led audiences—like the ancestral deer in the story—through layers of projected reality and created an underwater world. [20] This project is an outcome of my exploration of intermedia production, and the creative outcome inspired a journal article that I wrote titled “Multiverse: Reframing Vulnerable Realities through Intermedia Storytelling and Fluidity,” [21] published by Leonardo through the MIT Press in December 2025 (early access). Here is the link to the journal article where you can read more about this project: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YzZ4eSCHTpQz6XkSNQmcYS8smSIDWqNZ

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Up in the Sky (2025)

Up in the Sky is a toy theatre work, customized for the song “Up in the Sky” by Antenna Fuzz [23]. Toy theatre is a form of miniature theatre that was popular in home settings in early 19th century Europe. This art form was later repurposed by contemporary puppeteers in Europe and Americas. Working with movement artist and puppeteer Kate Brehm, I was introduced to this medium through a sustainable lens. Most of our materials were from recycled bins including cardboards, paper boxes, and scraps of random materials. Toy theatre also has an agency of being performed anywhere due to its portability, especially on the streets, to an intimate audience. For example, Great Small Works is a collective that utilizes toy theatre in their politically charged productions by using “the compressed power of the miniature.” [24] For me, this is one of the most accessible ways to build a universe.

 

One major characteristic of puppetry is that anything can be a puppet, and there are no fixed ways to build one. It is an inclusive medium for innovation, problem solving, and playful thinking. One former collaborator mentioned that animation (two-dimensional) can produce worlds where a movie set (three-dimensional) is hard to achieve. Puppetry, as a three-dimensional medium, has the same capacity to defy gravity and conformity like what an animation can easily accomplish. For example, in Up in the Sky, an airplane flies in outer space (and the audience accepts it right away), and human body parts (in this case, hands) become enormous beings in the show. This song addresses flying anxiety, and the toy theatre creates the wacky plot that goes on in one’s head in a ridiculous but playful way. Performing puppetry is also an uncanny in-between state. On one hand, puppeteers need to exaggerate actions to make the intention come across. But on the other hand, the subtleness of movements can express so much emotion and give out plenty of messages. Breathings are what make the objects alive, and pacing is what tells a story– and the rest is left to the power of the audience's imagination. Like an audience member who came up to me after the show, they said: “I was brought to another world during the performance. And when it ended, something in my world changed.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Liminal Play: spontaneous composition, embodied knowledge, and cathartic energy

 

Duo band with fellow multi-instrumentalists Micah Huang (ongoing since 2025)

Micah Huang and I first met in the course Harvard New Music Ensemble, where I was a teaching assistant and Micah was an enrolled student. The course explored a diverse range of living composers’ repertoire. Many of those works were influenced by what George Lewis argued as the “Eurological” [26] perspectives, and the majority of students have a classical music background and the conversation was mostly filtered through this cultural way of thinking. Both immersed in classical music environments before, Micah and I were able to communicate in this musical language. We witnessed each other playing different instruments (on percussion, guitar, bass, piano, electronics…etc.), and were aware of each other being polyglot in musical styles at occasions outside of this course. Yet, we were mostly in situations where we code switched. It was not until almost two years later at a random jam when we were waiting for the rest of the group to show up that we experienced each other’s native and unfiltered energy of playing music. We had no idea what we just did, but we clicked. We began to jam weekly on piano and drum. We jammed, but we spent more time talking about what happened and even more time on subjects from all over the place. The spontaneous music that we collectively created confused both of us, but we always felt a sense of relief and somehow “cleansing” of some sort. But what have we been cleansing of? We shared the music we like, talked about our upbringings, and the dilemma arose. To identify, we were confronted with the discourse of what Asian American musicking is and what Asian Americanness entails in this country. As a third and a 1.5 generation Asian Americans, our multiculturality gives us a complex sense of belonging. And I often joke about me growing up having cultural shock with the culture I grew up in. As a young artist, I went through a journey of trying to assimilate into different groups, but the general public was not ready for interdisciplinarity or someone floating around the edges of definitions, both in Taiwan and in the United States. It is this in-betweenness that connected Micah and I. And the resistance, resilience, and emotion behind our fight for fluid identities are transformed into the energy when we perform with our limbs and the embodied knowledge that we obtained from navigating different spaces.

 

We also expanded our instrumentation to duo between me on electric bass and Micah on drums. Sometimes we have me on drums and Micah on electric guitar. And Micah has been freestyling with his voice while playing an instrument. Micah has also introduced me to Punk. Perhaps rather than introducing, it was more like reaffirming to what he has been describing me, that I’m punk. This is not the first time someone has used it to describe my quality, and I had pushed back on this label for years– which in retrospect, was punk. I rejected the term due to a lack of information, and my reference was the white-washed Hollywood version of punk culture. In the music academy, I remember being at an occasion where a contemporary classical composer claimed that her chamber music work used the element of “punk music,” because she incorporated some metal percussion in the piece. I still wasn’t sure what punk was supposed to be, but seeing faculty and colleagues nodding their heads at this vague statement, I found the whole situation absurd. 

 

I still am not sure what punk is. But I think that is the point. It is a liminal space that welcomes a lack of definitions, asserts that identities are fluid, and are ready to change form as resistance before/during/after the infrastructure/systemic forces/authorities strike. It is challenging to come up with a description of our collective work, but this was what Micah and I wrote: “Their band is a cathartic musical space that combines the ethos of free music with the attitude of punk rock. This creates a liberatory aesthetic space, oriented towards spontaneity and presence in the moment; a space of fluidity and embodied knowledge in which music functions not as a product, but as a process of healing and self-discovery.”

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Media 10.

A playlist of excerpts from our weekly jams in chronological order (these are bass heavy recordings, so listening with headphones or playback device with lower frequency capacity is recommended): https://soundcloud.com/michele-cheng/sets/duo-jam-playlist/s-T2DSWkKh5NN? [27]

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Bibliography

[1] Boal, Augusto. 1979. Theater of the Oppressed. New York: Urizen Books

[2] CCA. Michele Cheng – Cornell Council for the Arts. February 23, 2024. https://cca.cornell.edu/portfolio/mc-expression/.

[3] Michele Cheng. Installation. 2024. 1:10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz8pginnsd4.

[4] Michele Cheng. Installation_Interaction. 2024. 2:35. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IimnnyMchS8.

[5] michele-cheng. “Michele Cheng | Composer · Official Website.” Accessed May 1, 2026. https://www.michelecheng.com/essay.

[6] see [5]

[7] see [5]

[8] Michele Cheng. Podcast. 2026. 11:45. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O-Qu-QjINU.

[9] michele-cheng. “Michele Cheng | Composer · Official Website_ Publicaion.” Accessed May 1, 2026. https://www.michelecheng.com/blog1.

[10] This is an excerpt from the work’s program note. The audiovisual installation was showcased at the 33OC artist residency open house on May 25, 2025. 

[11] Michele Cheng. Toffia When Water Has Perfect Memory. 2025. 10:38. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxsoJaZK_kE.

[12] Thingamajigs. “Redline Redefined.” Accessed May 1, 2026. http://www.thingamajigs.org/redline-redefined.

[13] “Strawberry Creek - FoundSF.” Accessed May 1, 2026. https://www.foundsf.org/Strawberry_Creek.

[14] see [12]

[15] see [12]

[16] “2024 Redline Redefined | Michele Cheng - Strawberry Creek Park - YouTube.” Accessed April 9, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qorE1xYow6w.

[17] Instruction from the score of A Different Reality part I.

[18] michele-cheng. “Michele Cheng | Composer · Official Website_ A Different Reality.” Accessed April 9, 2026. https://www.michelecheng.com/a-different-reality.

[19] Cheng, Michele. 2025. “Multiverse : Reframing Vulnerable Realities through Intermedia Storytelling and Fluidity.” Leonardo (Oxford), advance online publication, December 24. https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON.a.2656.

[20] michele-cheng. “Michele Cheng | Composer · Official Website_Multiverse.” Accessed May 1, 2026. https://www.michelecheng.com/multiverse.

[21] see [19]

[22] Michele Cheng. Multiverse. 2024. 8:08. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2f8zpXyRTc.

[23] “Antenna Fuzz.” Accessed May 1, 2026. https://antennafuzz.com/.

[24]  “GSW.” Accessed May 1, 2026. https://greatsmallworks.org/.

[25] Michele Cheng. Up in the Sky [Live]. 2025. 4:11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDQZqObs-oE.

[26] Lewis, George E. 2002. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal (Chicago) 22 (1): 215–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/1519950.

[27] SoundCloud. “Duo Jam Playlist.” April 28, 2026. https://soundcloud.com/michele-cheng/sets/duo-jam-playlist/s-T2DSWkKh5NN.

[28] Michele Cheng. Duo (Michele Cheng & Micah Huang). 2026. 7:02. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kjUoqevyhg.​