Many artists migrate across geographies, and their practices ultimately negotiate a space between movement and settlement. This concert explores migration and absorption—being influenced and, in turn, inspiring.

The program opens with Interludium A by Isang Yun and Sequenzen by Unsuk Chin, two Korean composers who established their artistic lives in Germany, drawing connections to the Italian composer Luciano Berio’s Sequenza.

Selections from Miroirs by Maurice Ravel, alongside Elliot Teo’s new work Cross Exam, engage with the visual world and the act of seeing, drawing connections between sound and image.

Finally, Ahmed Alom’s Displaced Études and Zhou Long’s Dunhuang Fantasy offer deeply personal reflections, paying homage to Cuban rhythms and ancient Chinese frescoes, respectively, while transforming cultural memory through distance.

Program:

Isang Yun                  Interludium A (1982) 13 min  

Unsuk Chin              Sequenzen from Piano Etudes No.2 (1996, revised 2003) 3 min  

Luciano Berio          Sequenza IV (1965) 11 min
(Intermission)
Maurice Ravel          Selections from Miroirs (1904-05) 14 min

                                    III. Une barque sur l'océan

                                    IV. Alborada del gracioso

Ahmed Alom            Displaced Etudes No.1 (2024) 3 min

Zhou Long               Dunhuang Fantasy (2017) 13 min

Elliot Teo                 Cross Exam for solo piano (2026) 7 min

In conjunction with our current exhibition How Asian Is It?, Lilly Wei will co-moderate with Kelly Ma an intergenerational conversation about cultural histories and abstract painting.  

Exhibition artists Emily Cheng, David Diao, and Charles Yuen will discuss their experiences along with guest artist Yuan Fang. 

* Doors open at 6:00PM. Seating is first come, first serve.

Moderator Bios: 

Lilly Wei is a New York-based art critic, art writer, journalist, and independent curator  whose area of interest is contemporary global art. Deeply committed to not-for-profit  art organizations that support emerging artists, artists at risk, and art writers, she  serves on the board of trustees of several such institutions, as well as on the advisory  committee of others. Wei was born in Chengdu, China and has an MA in art history  from Columbia University, New York. 

Kelly Ma is a curator and writer based in New York and has held curatorial and leadership positions at Asia Society Museum, New York; M+, Hong Kong; and Para Site, Hong Kong, and organized exhibitions internationally. A bilingual writer, she has contributed to ArtAsiaPacific, ARTCO, and monographs and anthologies published by Phaidon and Rizzoli. Born and raised in Taipei, Ma received her BA in visual art and history of art and architecture from Brown University.

Artists Bios: 

Emily Cheng is a painter living and working in New York. She has a degree from Rhode Island School of Design and  spent three years studying at the New York Studio School. She has had more than forty solo museum exhibitions and has received numerous awards, among them one from the  National Endowment for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner award. She taught art history and studio art at the School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union, New York University, and California Institute of Arts, to name a few. 

David Diao was born Chengdu, China, and has lived in New York since 1955. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College in that year. His first exhibitions were at the Paula Cooper and Leo Castelli galleries in 1969. Diao is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery. A retrospective of his work was presented by the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, in 2015. 

Yuan Fang was born in Shenzhen, China, in 1996. Growing up in a major metropolitan city and later relocating to the United States shaped her global and cross-cultural perspective. Working primarily in large scale abstraction, Fang’s paintings are characterized by lyrical, expansive gestures and densely layered surfaces. Her compositions often evoke distorted bodily forms, unfolding through an intuitive and improvisational process that embraces risk, movement, and transformation. Her practice reflects on the tension between global interconnectedness and diasporic identity. Fang has received numerous accolades and exhibited internationally. In 2024, she was named to the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list and held a solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai (Flux). 

Charles Yuen was born in Hawaii and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He holds a master’s in fine arts from Rutgers University and a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Hawaii. Yuen has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, an Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. His work has also been  included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, and the Anhui Modern Art Museum in Hefei, China. “I view my art as part catharsis, part poetics, and inherently iconoclastic,” Yuen says. “It is connected to a social and civic vision that includes a founding membership in Godzilla, an Asian American arts organization.”