My work engages an ancient Chinese embodied knowledge system—an epistemology of knowing grounded in the guqin and the lore that surrounds it. Since 2007 I have treated the guqin and its lore as open source. I built SlowQin, a hybrid sister of the guqin. SlowQin is an electroacoustic instrument that I play to explore musical possibilities. It is also an artefact through which I practise contemporary art and performance, and a tool with which I pursue an artistic research protocol whose mode is open-endedness.

2026, SlowQin has undergone a radical redesign. Its new features are separate pickups for each of the seven strings, new gestural sensors, and the integration of embedded AI. The separate pickups enable a reciprocal process between times and spaces, between each string and its field, between trained hands and trained models, between shared memories. Out of this, seven fields of sonic energy and knowledge are generated. In the space, each string opens its own field of sound through its own loudspeaker, and the embedded AI listens to my fingering and extends it into these fields.

Now situated in the AI age, the practice enters a new protocol of working with art and technology. I treat instruments and cultural knowledge as living systems rather than heritage to preserve or material for fusion. Through a sustained DIY practice of learning and unlearning, the work opens latent spaces: zones where different cultures and cosmologies, human and more-than-human, past and present can meet and generate new forms of listening, presence and imagination.

Currently my SlowQin performance is expanding into new collaborations. Dou E, with the butoh artist Yuko Kaseki, draws on the unjustly executed widow from Guan Hanqing’s thirteenth-century drama; sound, movement, light and shadow open a space in which injustice and the stories of others are retold. Webs of Power: Songs for a Secret Forest, with Bérénice Gaça Courtin, performed on 8 August 2026 at HALLE 14 Leipzig, joins voice, SlowQin and hidden networks of communication. These works move the instrument out of the soloist’s centre into a web of relations between different bodily practices and authorships. Multi-species listening means rethinking classification systems: not human-centric, but human situated within others. We are part of the landscape. This process is an opportunity to think about technology by thinking with others: species, times, cosmos, cultures, materials, atoms, many other stories.