Yiqing Zhu

As conversion and reversion between media continue to fuel Zhu Yiqing’s inspirations, a cultural sensitivity is progressively maturing. The years when Zhu Yiqing studied composition at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music witnessed an aesthetic reality in which standardized idioms based on historical models of European new music were concurrent with two other tendencies: a resistence against aloof academicism and a newly–felt urge to articulate a Chinese cultural identity. Already evident in his earliest works, Zhu Yiqing’s pluralism is both an acceptance and a negation of such a reality. The Silence of Borobudur (2014) meanders through a maze that blends musical antiquities from Japan, Indonesia, and China. The piece anticipated an ongoing series (“Chinese Poetry”) that engages with the composer’s Chinese and East Asian heritages, one that bypasses the stylistic clichés so often associated with an essentialist attitude towards cultural identity. Seen in this light, the refined polyphonic technique and the teachings of Formenlehre that are thrown into relief in works such as DeepGrey (2020) for orchestra, the First Prize winner at the Basel Composition Competition, and a series of works that reimagine the Baroque suite, including Partita (2019), a set of five virtuosic concertinos, should arguably be regarded as an equally remarkable example of how Zhu Yiqing culturally locates himself. Recently, an ever greater diversity of influences has seeped into his music, encompassing metal, techno, and glitch. But these elements do not appear to settle, nor do they proclaim dominance over one another. Such is the case of DeepBlue (2020) and  DeepVoid (2022). The former, a capriccio for large ensemble and electronics, features a porous milieu where jazzy snippets, electronic throbs, sizzles, beeps, and quotidian sounds like heartbeats and radio speech travel freely in and out, filtering and moulding one another.  In the latter, atmospheric allusions to gamelan and ancient folkish singing permeate a genre that is quintessentially occidental and canonical—the string quartet. The chameleon-like adaptability behind such a capricious musical assemblage, one that is constantly “en route to deterritorialization”, as Deleuzian critics would have it, originates more from a strong penchant for fluidity and change than from Zhu Yiqing’s cross-continental or intercultural experience in fact.

Unsurprisingly, “Deep-” as a prefix for Zhu Yiqing’s work titles comes from what preceded the rise of deep learning: the first chess robot to beat a human expert, Deep Blue. Zhu Yiqing sees it as a token of the kind of creativity that would lead him somewhere unknown and unpredictable. In the same spirit, he refers to the idea of convolution, which originally denotes a mathematical operation that couples one function with another. In digital image processing, for example, convolution results in blended information that turns the purely numerical into something “perceptual”—it is precisely this kind of threshold-crossing transformation that is the attraction here. Zhu Yiqing’s latest experimentation involves tactile and motion sensors and the visualization of sonic data. The carving, warping, and melting of sounds thus become even more real (or surreal) in the sensory and physical dimensions. And what will follow? As yet we do not know.  What we can be sure of, however, is that this is a daring, unreserved, and tender mind. As his travel diaries attest, to circle back to where we begin regarding Zhu Yiqing as a keen writer, when roaming around different corners of Europe, he never restrained himself from marvelling, sympathizing, being moved, exhausted, and, most importantly, extending his antenna in unknown directions.