We were lucky to catch up with Anqi Liu recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Anqi thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
Life is about uncertainties. Within the mist of unpredictability, one who always takes a risk to travel to unknown territories owns multifaceted experiences. I feel this is essential to a living being- to experience, feel, and still believe in and love something. I often choose to follow my intuition, even though the reality or circumstances taught me there is a risk by picking certain paths. I told myself, then so what? It is an experience, and what happened in the journey became part of you, pictured who you are, were marks of your existence, even though you are such a tiny and ephemeral, fleeting dust in the universe.
Anqi, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am a composer, multimedia artist. I started MY formal compositional studies at twenty-three although I began my piano training at age four. Despite this late beginning, my music has been performed across the U.S, Europe, and Asia at venues and concert halls like Le Poisson Rouge (NYC), Shapeshifter Lab (NYC), The Firehouse Space (NYC), Dusk Dawn Club (BJ), Beijing Mao Live House, INNER FIELD (NYC), Spectrum (NYC), Heluting Concert Hall ( Shanghai Conservatory), Suzhou Art Center, Central Conservatory Concert Hall, Palace of Fontainebleau and others. She has been commissioned by and has been closely working with a group of musicians, ensembles, and festivals including The Reiefestival 2023 (Belgium), Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik 2022 (Austria), ANALYSIS CREATION and TEACHING of ORCHESTRATION (ACTOR, Montreal), Ensemble Palimpsest, Steven Schick, Kynan Johns, King Britt, Kyle Motl, Teresa Díaz de Cossio, Nina Vanhoenacker, Ilana Waniuk, Peter Ko, Meraki Chamber Players, New Brunswick Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, Mivos Quartet, DECODA Music, Air Contemporary Music (Central Conservatory, Beijing), Vanguard Culture San Diego, Nouveau Classical Project, Norrbotten NEO (Sweden), and others. Her works have been selected and featured in academies and conferences such as Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2021, Ensemble Dal Niente Summer Residency 2021, International Society of Bassists Convention 2021, Oh My Ears Festival 2021, Ircam ManiFeste the Academy composition workshop 2020, ELECTRONIC MUSIC WEEKEND MISE-EN_PLACE Bushwick 2019, Kalv Music Academy (Sweden), California Electronic Music Exchange Concert 2018 (CEMEC Stanford), Ecoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau (Paris), International Computer Music Conference 2017 (ICMC), Connecticut Summerfest Contemporary Music Festival, and others.
Pursuing my Ph.D. at UC San Diego, I got my bachelor’s degrees in Law and Music Performance at Xiamen University and an MA in Composition from Rutgers University. Distinct from conventional compositional training, my music degree included extensive travels throughout the Chinese hinterlands to seek and study the original folk music of Chinese minority groups. Experiences like these fostered unusual perspectives of sounds in me. Deeply carving in the internal structure of sounds to maximally reveal unknown sonic potential, I experiments with diverse possibilities to expand space and the dimensions of sound. These experiments often lead to challenges that call into question conventional ways of playing or viewing the instruments. At UCSD, I studied electronic music with King Britt, Rand Steiger, Miller Puckette, Tom Erbe and Natasha Diels. I starts to perform modular synthesizers after studying with Tom Erbe. My composition teachers include Lei Liang, Marcos Balter, Anthony Davis, Roger Reynolds, Rand Steiger, Chinary Ung, Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Paul Rudy, Robert Aldridge, Charles Fussell, and Gerald Chenoweth. In addition, she had composition lessons with Clara Iannotta, Allain Gaussin, François Paris, Isabel Mundry, Chaya Czernowin, Mark Andre, Pierluigi Billone and Per Mårtensson.
Being born as a Manchurian in Inner Mongolia, the autonomous province in Northern China, my experiences have always felt complex. Past memories in both the western world and China has driven me to give a voice to the underrepresented culture I came from.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
We are in a very different time-space that our ancestors never experienced. In the past, people sought answers from books, research as well as traditions. Now internet connects, distributes, and shares tons of information as well as knowledge every millisecond. The overwhelming of these connections didn’t build bridges among us, but opposite, more people started feeling themselves living on the isolated island. In this sphere, we are all pioneers in thinking of paths of our life, family, and community. I feel that if we could deeply listen to voices coming from our innermost heart, rather than relying upon abundant online or multiple resourced information, like, really listen to it and often doubt, do I actually listen at all, do I listen to the real, the honesty and the true at all or just already filtered super surface. If a society is full of people who indeed listens, arts show in front of it naturally.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
Being an artist is not an easy thing. This career is carried by the constantly ongoing, unsure paths that I feel aren’t even one moment in my life that I am certain about. But this is the charm of being an artist- you dive into the deep unknown, and you brought back concrete artworks.
Contact Info:
- Website: anqiliu.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anqiliuart/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anqiliu.x/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anqi-liu-b77979ab/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn4UGmfMmKe07oRptsSkC4g
Image Credits
All by myself.