Rather than treating art as an escape from reality, I use it to activate, interact with, and mold it. All the knowledge and intuition at our disposal can form a world where no one resorts to violence and coercion because everyone has access to all the support and resources they need, but we have to adjust our cultural mindset to nurture rather than compete or punish. I design frameworks of performance to investigate alternatives to structures of oppression by mobilizing an audience's empathy to create, to risk, and to transform themselves. Injustice, silence, and the drive of individuals to organize for empowerment in the material, cultural, and intellectual spheres inspire me. My compositions are replicable not necessarily in sound but in the collective investigative process of collectively relevant oppressions. While there are always power dynamics in a group, my treatment deliberately challenges typical roles of creator and consumer. It reveals the audience members, their perceptions, and dynamics of power in the space as well as the studied elements of taboo, aleatoric sound, and heightened sense. 

Conventional notation and performance practices don't fit what I have to offer and the relationships of interaction I want with performers, so I draw on theater techniques and guided improvisation. By redistributing power of choices to performers and even audience, I invite non-sourceable creativity and live interaction, changing listening to a multi-sensory experience in which participants weigh their personal boundaries and truths in performing what I demand of them. I know my work is going well when participants light up with discovery in the novel context that my style of exploration creates. My first work of this type was full-contact violin, in which I, costumed in briefs, bondage rope, and medical needles, invite the audience to move freely about and to touch me in any way they find appropriate. Rather than to execute a through-composed and notated piece, my role in the composition is to interpret the energies of those around me into sound and gesture. Although evocative of sexuality, these pieces heighten audience member experience from passive consumption to active creativity; even if their choice is to sit quietly or even exit the space, they deliberately participate in a defined and collectively recognized framework. 

The initial impulse for a new piece comes unbidden: for full-contact violin, I had movement in mind after working with a choreographer; for One Journey I was overcome by cycles of movement and stillness while traveling to numerous collective farming communities. A new piece for choir, soloists, and piano quartet, it demands the performers themselves to fragment and to explore alternatives to their collective and personal experiences of home, travel, yearning, bodies, and death through improvised drama nested in the score. When working with voice in One Journey, I had to treat not only pitch ranges but independence in rhythm and harmony with care to express effectively dynamics of power and vulnerability from the text, a selection of writings about disillusionment from displacement and sickness, gender transition, and mortality.The unceremonious transplant of my childhood from China to Connecticut marked me with an unsettled and wandering nature. Rather than weakening my impact, having only surrogate homes has taught me to be fluid in mobility. A keen desire for others to access their voices easily follows expression of my own power.