Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Zhang.
Kevin, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I am a composer of contemporary concert music and sound art who has been based here in San Diego since 2012, when I matriculated at UCSD to pursue my PhD in music. Originally, I grew up in the Northeast, having lived in New York and Boston before moving out west. I was lucky growing up in that I was able to have had exposure to a great number of musical communities and artistic resources all around me. During my high-school years, I played piano in chamber groups and clarinet in youth orchestras with very talented peers, and I proceeded to focus on music composition in college. After a brief foray living in London, I ended up in California to do an MFA in experimental music at UC Irvine, and I’ve been down here ever since.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
My practice is largely steeped in the Western, “concert” — i.e. to say, “classical” — tradition, although my work of the past two or so years has mainly been electronic or electroacoustic projects, including site-specific sound-installation work and acousmatic sound designs in collaboration with theatrical and movement artists. I am very much interested in our perceptual thresholds of phenomena such as duration and proportion. When I was in graduate school, much of my research focused on music cognition and music-language relationships. I became very interested in using the medium of sound to explore the liminalities and interstices between experience, cognition, and comprehension, and I certainly drew a lot of inspiration from, e.g., the poetics of a number of contemporary writers who I felt had long been already interrogating these concepts in their own respective mediums.
How can artists connect with other artists?
Collaboration is certainly an important driving factor in how I approach my creative practice. Even if I were to be making something in the relatively conventional context of composing, e.g., a chamber score, it is still important for me to write specifically for the idiosyncratic personalities of specific instrumentalists, vocalists, and ensembles who would be playing the work. But this is even more important when I collaborate with artists across interdisciplinary boundaries, which describes basically most all of my recent work. Artistic communities can definitely feel fragmented in today’s massively saturated landscape, so it’s on all of us to push ourselves out of our comfort zones every once in a while.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
I have some select documentation of my work on my website, but I think the most important thing we can do as members of our artistic communities to contribute to the continued dynamism of these communities is to actively seek out and, as much as we can, attend gigs/concerts/events/etc.
Contact Info:
- Website: kevinzhangcomposer.com
Image Credit:
Kevin Zhang, Arnel Sancianco, Andy Chen
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