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All my attempts, then, are to depict a singular spiritual landscape with music -- one born of both ancient art and elemental landscapes.
It is a beauty that is vast, desolate, and tranquil; as if it has been waiting, beyond time, for a thousand years.
My initial explorations were rooted in a partiality for Chinese classical art aesthetics. I sought to interpret 'silent' masterpieces -- handscroll paintings and classical poetry -- to understand how they construct time, organise space, and convey emotion without sound. The 'gradual unscrolling' manner of viewing a handscroll, for instance, its juxtaposition of 'multiple views', and the ambiguous sense of tense found in classical poetry, all led me to reconsider the nature of musical narrative. It suggested that musical structure itself could be a 'recombination of fragments'. My understanding of the vast 'unpainted spaces' (留白 liú bái) in landscape painting -- the clouds, mist, and water -- in turn, fundamentally shaped my own conception of musical 'space'.
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Xia Gui, Twelve Landscape Views (section) ink on silk, between 1195 - 1224
It was my travels, however, that allowed these nascent theoretical strands to coalesce, ultimately giving rise to my core aesthetic.
When I stood before the 'austere beauty' of the Tian Shan mountains, traversed the vast deserts of Kashgar, or felt the 'desolation and loneliness' of the Armenian highlands, the immense, visceral shock from these magnificent and primitive landscapes suddenly collided with my earlier reflections on classical aesthetics. It was in that moment that I clearly heard the voice I was truly pursuing: a Gu-Pu (古樸, 'ancient and primitive') aesthetic.
Mountains in Pamir, Tashkurgan, Xinjiang, China
This is a quality that is 'primitive and simple', clear, unadorned, and yet possesses a 'rough-edged' beauty. This pursuit of Gu-Pu, in turn, compelled a refinement of my technique. It reaffirmed my belief in the necessity of 'moderation' (寫意 xie-yi, or 'depicting the spirit'), and it urged me to weave the concept of 'brushwork' into the sound itself. I began to 'paint' my music using fragmented materials, rather than long melodies or conventional counterpoint, leveraging dissonance to cultivate that indispensable 'roughness'.
Concept painting of my orchestral work Ocean
My travels also exposed me to the sounds rooted in the land, igniting a profound interest in ethnic music. Here too, I was not seeking to 'quote' melodies, but rather to find a way to 'internalize' and 'remould' their musical theory within my own work. When I encountered the Makam, for instance, I immersed myself in their underlying 'theory' and 'grammar', attempting to grasp their unique logic and then use that grammar to 'speak' a new musical vocabulary of my own.
Structure of my work Kashgar
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