Artist Interview


Work in Progress Showing 1


Work in Progress Showing 2

Wang Fei

Founder and Director of the North American Guqin Association

Union City, CA

Wang Fei is an internationally known guqin performer, educator, and scholar. She is considered one of the most experienced guqin artists of her generation. She is the founder and director of the North American Guqin Association and a council member of the China Guqin committee. Wang has experience internationally giving concert-level performances and presentations on the guqin and related arts to both Chinese and Western audiences. She has won several awards in the field of Chinese music and lectured at many universities. Wang and her collaborators will create a multidisciplinary project titled The Living Art of the Guqin: Beyond a Museum Piece. This project will feature traditional and contemporary instruments, digital projections and imagery and performance. The goal is to take the audience on a journey that will deliver this ancient art form into the new digital era of 21st century China. Photo by J.P. Dobrin.

Festival Weekend 3 Artist
Performing Thursday-Sunday, November 19-22, 8pm
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“From Beijing to San Francisco”
Internationally acclaimed guqin player Wang Fei reflects on the rapid changes in China over the past 30 years through her personal story with this exquisite and ancient Chinese instrument. From the Cultural Revolution when the guqin was considered one of the “Old Evils,” through China’s Open Door Policy when western culture upstaged traditional culture, and culminating in China’s explosive economic development at the turn of the century, Wang and her collaborators explore how cultural heritage survives in a globalized environment and how traditional art challenges the contemporary audience.

http://www.chineseculture.net/guqin/newsletters/09nagaevents/bjtosfreportweb.htm
The world premiere of “From Beijing to San Francisco” – a newly commissioned multi-disciplinary work for the guqin developed by Wang Fei, the Founder and Director of NAGA – was performed to great critical acclaim in the Performing Diaspora Festival at CounterPULSE in San Francisco on four consecutive nights from November 19 to 22, 2009. [...]

Wang Fei is a Performing Diaspora Resident Artist at CountePULSE.
See her at weekend 3 of Performing Diaspora, November 19-22.
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From Beijing to San Francisco: production process
It has been four months since I got really into this new work at my residency. It is so cool, the more I work on this project, the more [...]

My project “From Beijing to San Francisco” at CP  is a newly commissioned musical piece, bringing the guqin, a Chinese scholarly art, into an innovative, multidisciplinary stage performance, and introducing the ancient, living tradition of the guqin into modern life. It uses a guqin player’s own story to illustrate the fate of the guqin, an ancient [...]

 What is guqin?
The guqin, a seven-stringed zither, is China’s oldest stringed instrument with a documented history of about 3,000 years. It became part of a tradition cultivated by Chinese scholars and literati and has been associated with philosophers, sages, and emperors since the time of Confucius. Perhaps because of this illustrious history, following the rise [...]