The audience is advised to read this description after experiencing the musical work.

‘Brief’ in the title denotes that it is a shorter version than its sister work Seoljanggu, which germinates from the same idea. It also signifies that it is an easier version for those engaging with the piece (i.e. the performer and the audience), in the same sense as the traditional Korean repertoire 짧은 산조.

This piece continues my enquiry on the essence of our being-togetherness, as exemplified (or epitomised) by the idiosyncratic condition of a concert, where spectators seemingly do not interact with each other, yet can be connected at an intangible and deeper level.

The enquiry is approached through multiple dialectical engagements. An intensification of the specifically acute co-presence of minds (and bodies) in the same space-time is contrasted with an evocation of a reflected hypothetical situation from without, so that the listener could differentiate between a viewpoint exclusively owned by his/her group of co-existing listeners, and a possible viewpoint from an outsider who does not completely co-exist for the same location and duration. In the compositional task of radically distancing the former from the latter, one strategy is to disguise the deviant and nuanced performance as a traditional janggu performance, such that it simultaneously appears as two entirely different things. Moreover, listeners' attentional gamut is widen to include both the tiniest muscular contraction and the broader inter-being awareness, while the collective distribution of audience's attentional choreography is increasingly gathered and spatio-temporally sharpened.

As part of an artistic research, there will be demonstrations of how my theoretical-practical framework informed by theories such as conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) could contribute to better articulative strategies in achieving the above artistic goal.

    This video takes a macroscopic and global view of Hong Kong culture, connecting her idiosyncratic cultural, historical, geographical and political conditions in a symbolic play in relation to greater Chinese culture.

    Isolation of Hong Kong from Mainland China and her mixed cultural influences, before and after the Handover, effectuate the ongoing osmotic evolution, an exchange that is a drag and pull to the development of Chinese cultural and political status. A world within a world, a water within a water, is the visual structure developed. Images like Sea, Ink and Calligraphy, as well as different modes of sound diffusion and mise-en-scène are some of the elements being used to generate micro and macro movements via a world-within-world model.

    This piece is about perspective-taking: listeners taking perspectives to the people in the past, to fellow listeners, to musicians, to composer, musicians to the listeners, the composer, to each other, and composer to all of the above etc. The method is to set up specific conditions that heighten awareness of dissimilarity, demobilize habitual routes of perception and cognition, and necessitate the search of new routes that involves perspective taking.

    To this end, there are non-habitual forces of exclusion and inclusion on different levels throughout the piece. Exclusions ranges from sensory, so that each listener receives different visual and auditory information, to aesthetic/socio-cultural, so that comprehension and appreciation requires background knowledges and experiences. Inclusions, which offers new routes in bridging exclusivities, recruits the common sensorimotor and cognitive capabilities of all humans, i.e. the intentional use of the human body, as well as the schemtic processes we perceives thousand times on a daily basis — balancing, counterforces, matching, merging, source-path-goal, removal of restraints etc. (c.f. Johnson 1987 and Lakoff 1987).

    In this redistribution of knowledge availability, this piece aims to confront the situation of social, cultural, political and ideological co-existence and conflicts prevalent in today's world. It is hoped that the listeners of different backgrounds and capacities can find their own ways in perspective-taking, and at the same time acknowledge and respect the fact that one may not know everything of the other perspectives.