PULSING SOUND SERIES-3 imUnsure: Jixue Yang

imUnsure

Conceived and produced over the past two years, imUnsure is a multimedia piano+ performance curated and performed by pianist Jixue Yang. Blending acoustic sounds, electronic soundscapes, and immersive visuals, the program features six newly commissioned works by diasporic East Asian women composers and artists. It explores the tension between imposed identities (U) and the inner self (i), addressing themes of cultural displacement, intergenerational trauma, and the search for authentic self-expression amid societal expectations. In this way, the concert stage becomes a space for reflection, resistance, and storytelling.

Jixue Yang is a contemporary pianist whose work bridges Eastern and Western traditions through acoustic and experimental performance. She has appeared internationally with ensembles including Klangforum Wien, BlackBox Ensemble, and Infrasound Ensemble, and has held residencies at Nief-Norf and SinusTon Festival. A prizewinning performer and co-founder of the electroacoustic trio Apply Triangle, she co-produced the acclaimed album Oxalis Triangularis. Through her solo performances and interdisciplinary collaborations, Yang continues to expand the piano’s expressive possibilities and reimagine the boundaries of contemporary concert experience.

Program:

Tian Qin GG Prelude (2025)

Film: Tian Qin

Ya-Lan Chan Kintsugi (2025)

Film: Huang- Yi Chan

Huijuan Ling A Darkness Ever So Soft (2025)

Film: Lulu Yueyi Wang

Shasha Chen Chain of Evidence(2025)

Jee Won Kim 막 / 幕 / veil (2025)

I. Am I myself

II. or just a shadow?

Texts:

막 / 幕 / veil

Am I myself

or just a shadow?

Texts:

바람은 지나가고 나는 그 틈 사이에서 숨 쉰다.

风掠而过，我在缝隙之间呼吸。

The wind passes through

I breathe between the gaps.

닿는 듯, 닿지 않는…

仿佛触碰，却终未相触……

So near to touch, yet never meeting…

나인지, 그림자인지.

是我，还是我的影子。

Am I myself, or just a shadow.

I sometimes felt lonely; it seemed like nobody heard my voice.

Program Notes:

GG Prelude (2025)

This is a very narrative piece. It takes on various tones of mine when I try to communicate with my memories. Specifically, the memories where I set standards for myself based on other people's values. The standards often

related to whether or not I was a good girl, as if they had all been there before, as if they invented the ruler. I was left wondering — they were once a girl, too. Just like me.

I tried to hold my memories closer with both hands to get a better look at them, but they were like liquid that I couldn't hold in my palm.

GG stands for “Good Girl”. People say “good girl” when they appreciate their female dog. Am I just a dog of yours?

Kintsugi (2025)

This piece draws on the idea of Kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, silver, or platinum, where the cracks are cherished as part of the object’s history—as a response to Jixue’s project. It reflects on embracing the broken parts of life—not concealing them, but transforming them into an art form. Infused with the tranquil energy of meditation, mantra-like chanting threads through the music to shape a contemplative soundscape.

A Darkness Ever So Soft (2025)

When I think about the relationship between Asian baby boomer parents and their millennial children, I think of the last five words of Haruki Murakami's novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls: a darkness ever so soft. Do they love their children? Do they care about their children? Of course. They give everything they have to their children. But during these children's early years, did their parents care about their children's mundane achievements over their well-being? Did they sign their children up for too many extracurricular activities, disregarding whether their children like them or not? Did they value the mainstream definition of "success" over who their children really are? Did they emotionally neglect their children? Did they unintentionally hurt their children due to their inability to see their children as individual human beings instead of extensions of themselves? The list goes on.

I was chatting with a Korean-American friend, and we were joking about toxic parents. She laughed and responded, "We are Asian, of course our parents are toxic."

What's our Asian parents' love then? What is that caring, yet controlling, hurting love? Here are my two cents: their love is like a darkness. It tenderly wraps around you and protects you from any exterior harm. Yet, it hurts, that wrap hurts. But you don't feel like you can say anything, because the hurt is coming from a place of love. They give everything they have to you. How can you complain?

A Darkness Ever So Soft is commissioned by and dedicated to Jixue Yang for the imUnsure project. I sincerely appreciate her dedication to this project and her dedication to this collaboration.

Chain of Evidence (2025)

This work responds to a traumatic incident experienced by the pianist, who requested a piece to process and express it. As an East Asian female musician and immigrant, after years of constant scrutiny, pressure, harassment, and unjust power dynamics within the music industry—marginalization, discrimination, and verbal violence—she suffered respiratory alkalosis during a performance.

The performance approaches a near-recreation of the original experience. Every musical phrase length in this work is determined by and synchronized with the performer’s own breath. The music becomes a corporeal space, where each note, each emotion, and every bodily reaction carries the imprint in the chain of her lived pain, struggle, and resistance. Time stretches and collapses with each breath, immersing the audience in a shared experience of her enactment of memory—as we breathe within the same social fabric, we have always been part of this chain of evidence.

막 / 幕 / veil (2025)

Has anything you did ever felt as if it passed through some kind of veil and was understood differently? Since I was very young, I have lived with the worry that others might see me through a veil of prejudice and misunderstand me. This fear grew stronger after I came to the United States. My words and actions seemed to pass through a veil of “because she is Asian, because she came from somewhere else” before reaching others, and with Koreans, they seemed to pass through another veil of “because she is Korean, she should say this” before being understood. This may be nothing more than my own illusion, or maybe it is reality. But what is certain is that because of it, I have changed, and I have become lonely.

I sometimes wonder, what if my true self is still behind the veil, and what people actually see is not me but just my shadow? And when I try to become one of them, when I change myself to fit their expectations, could it be that my real self is disappearing, and my shadow is what I’m becoming?

Tian Qin

Chinese composer Tian Qin is known for her music’s compelling, humorous, and visually evocative qualities. She enjoys integrating text, craft, film, and choreography into her compositions, often pushing the boundaries of traditional forms while incorporating her cultural heritage, and focuses on engaging communal experiences. Her music has been workshopped or performed by many ensembles, such as the Windscape Ensemble, Unheard-of Ensemble, the Rhythm Method, Duo Impetuoso, Loadbang, Kenetic, Musiqa, Loop 38, and Roomful of Teeth. She is also the 2024 American Guild of Organists Student Commissioning Project winner. Additionally, she is a teaching artist at MusiqaLab at Madison High School, American Festival for the Arts, and a music theory instructor at Opus One Chamber Music School. She is also an active member of Gamelan of the New Moon and a raga student of Ragavan Manian.

Tian Qin graduated from the Shanghai Conservatory (grades 7–12), Manhattan School of Music (BM), and Rice University (MM, Brown Fellowship). She studied composition with Ying Din, Marjorie Merryman, Karim Al-Zand, Shi-hui Chen, and Pierre Jalbert, and piano with Xiangjun Yu and Jiayin Li.

Ya-Lan Chan

Taiwanese composer Ya-Lan Chan is committed to the collaborative nature of music-making, emphasizing the use of musical gestures to craft nuanced, transparent soundscapes. Her interdisciplinary collaborations span visual, dance, and lighting design, reflecting her dedication to exploring diverse artistic mediums. Recently awarded the 2025 Nief-Norf Festival International Call for Scores Winner and several other distinctions, including the winner of the 2024 INMF New Voices Competition, the 2022 Manhattan Prize for String Quartet, and a finalist in the 12th Mivos Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize. She received commissions from Percussion Ensemble at the Manhattan School of Music, New Chamber Ballet, Project 23.6 N, and grants from the National Culture and Arts Foundation of Taiwan. Her work is published by Babel Scores.

Huijuan Ling

Huijuan Ling is a composer, keyboardist, and educator currently based in Terre Haute, IN. She likes to draw her inspiration outside the boundaries of the wobbly concept of Western art music and enjoys the process of discovering and negotiating a sound world that feels authentic both to her and her collaborators. Her music has been performed by ensembles and musicians such as the Utari Duo, Cracow Golden Quintet, Ciompi Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Imani Winds, JACK Quartet, Line Upon Line Percussion, Patchwork Duo, cellist Ashley Walters, pianist Gloria Cheng, Kris Rucinski, and others at music festivals and conferences such as Chopin and Friends Festival, RED NOTE New Music Festival, Yarn/Wire International Institute, Weekend of Chamber Music, Nief-Norf Summer Festival, Line Upon Line Winter Composer Festival, and more.

Huijuan holds degrees from Duke University (Ph.D. and A.M.), supported in part by a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; as well as from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (M.M.), and Shanghai Conservatory of Music (B.M.). She currently serves as a lecturer in composition and music theory at Indiana State University and taught courses and lessons at Duke University, Elon University, and Line Upon Line High School Composition Workshop. She is the associate director of Synthase Music and the coordinator of Synapse Composition Workshops.

Shasha Chen

Shasha Chen is a composer, performer, and multimedia artist whose work merges composition, performance, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Operating within the framework of conceptual (new) music theater, her practice addresses socio-political topics such as identity, gender, power dynamics, patriarchy, social injustice, immigration, and violence.

She is a 2026 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellow, the recipient of the 2025 International Hanns Eisler Scholarship of the City of Leipzig, and a SANE project residency artist hosted by Hellerau and Echo Factory. Chen was awarded the 2024 Presser Music Award and a fellowship at Art Omi Residency.

Her music and performance works have been presented at international festivals and institutions including Wiener Festwochen, TIME:SPANS Festival, MaerzMusik Festival, Forecast Forum, Phoenix Satellite, Hamburg International Music Festival, SENS Festival, impuls Festival, and Linecheck Music Meeting and Festival. Her artworks have also been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide.

Jee Won Kim(MM ’20)

Jee Won Kim is a composer based in the US and South Korea. Her music explores the relationship between time, space, and perception, often drawing inspiration from literature, visual art, and architecture. She focuses on creating a personal sound that extends beyond the auditory, opening possibilities for music to be seen, touched, and felt as much as it is heard. Her music has been performed by ensembles and artists including Festino Chamber Choir, International Contemporary Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Unheard-of Ensemble, Studio Dan, John Popham, Matti Pulkki,

Ben Roidl-Ward, Alberto Menjón, Clara Cho, and Jixue Yang. Her electronic works have been featured at ICMC and SEAMUS. She recently received a special prize in the 5th Ise-Shima International Composition Competition and was a finalist for the 2021 Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. She is a co-founder of the Korean women composers’ group, 이내 ENAE.

Jee Won holds a BM from Chung-Ang University and an MM in Composition from the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with Reiko Füting. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, studying with Aaron Travers and David Dzubay.

Huang-Yi Chan

Huang-Yi Chan is an interdisciplinary creator whose practice integrates moving image and philosophical thinking. He holds a master’s degree in Digital Media Design and is currently pursuing a master’s in Philosophy. With over ten years of experience in the imaging industry, he has collaborated with international brands such as Uniqlo, Nike, and Reebok. His current works focus on video, interactive installations, and immersive storytelling to explore the relationship between time, memory, and self-perception.

In his artistic practice, Chan seeks to establish a unique dialogue between the everyday and the philosophical. Through a delicate visual language and a reflective perspective, he reveals subtle transformations of perception, offering a profound interpretation of visual aesthetics and human thought.

Lulu Yueyi Wang

Lulu Yueyi Wang is a multidisciplinary artist born in Shanghai and based in New York. She works with painting, projection mapping and sculpture to create evolving spaces that evoke intense emotions like ecstasy, doom, and transcendence. These works explore themes of constraint and liberation drawn from her autobiographical experiences. She is currently pursuing a BA in Visual Arts and Computer Science at Columbia College, Columbia University, expected 2026. Her works have been exhibited in Shanghai, China, Nantes, France as well as in Massachusetts and New York. She has been recognized with the Barnard Viz Wall Art and Futurism Competition Award, featured in ICME, and selected as a finalist in the MIT AI Filmmaking Hackathon.

Professionally, she has worked with the Computational Design Lab directed by Dr. Lydia Chilton, the Imaging and Vision Laboratory directed by Dr. Shree Nayar, and the Design Tool Lab directed by Dr. Tiffany Tseng, curatorial department of the Toledo Museum of Art and contributed to Matthew Day Jackson's solo show at Pace Gallery.

Pulsing Sound is a bold, cross-disciplinary concert series curated by Sofia Ouyang, weaving sound, movement, and image into immersive artistic encounters.From intimate solo works to dynamic chamber ensembles, the season ranges from acoustic traditions to the frontiers of electronics, film, and multimedia. Featuring both rising talents and acclaimed collectives, Pulsing Sound invites audiences into innovative, emotionally resonant, and visually immersive experiences that capture the pulse of contemporary living.

THE BLANC proudly co-presents Pulsing Sound with an extraordinary range of ensembles and artists, celebrating the diversity of New York’s musical landscape and the creative communities shaping its future.

Link to:

PULSING SOUND SERIES - 2 Mensajes del Agua Lydia Rhea & Amber Scherer

PULSING SOUND SERIES -4 Illusion of Self : Telos Consort

PULSING SOUND SERIES-5 listen to the rain:The Rhythm Method X Anaïs Maviel