In writing these articles about the intersection of art and music, I find this is the first time the artist and the musician are the same.
Chinese composer and artist Yang Bao (b. 1991) is based in New York and has degrees from both The Juilliard School (pre-college) and the New England Conservatory (MM in piano performance). As a pianist, he’s performed Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with the China Philharmonic Orchestra under Long Yu at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing. As a composer, in 2023, his work for piano and orchestra, First Day on Mars, winner of the 2023 Maria Manetti Shrem Daniel Brewbaker Composer Prize, was given its premiere in California at the Festival Napa Valley. The work was subsequently performed at Carnegie Hall.
As an artist, he’s known for his large-scale stainless steel sound sculptures where he ‘transforms landscapes and architecture into monumental super-instruments’. His works are ‘reimagining sound as a tangible force that reshapes our perception of space and time’ (in his words).
In 2024, he did an exhibition at the Long Museum (West Bund) in Shanghai with multi-media artist Wa Liu. One of the works presented was his mixed media work Red Crescendo that mixed ‘mirror-finish stainless steel in geometric shapes’ and matte oil paintings.
Yang Bao: Red Crescendo, 2024
His work for piano and synthesizer of the same title takes up on his ideas of blurring the boundaries between the visible and the invisible through a reimagining of conventional perceptions and spatial dimensions. This, for him, is one of the real meanings of music.
Using the image of a paper airplane, but rendered in red-painted stainless steel, against a similarly coloured matte oil painting, Bao seems to take us through the imagined folding of the shape. The shape of the metal plane is musical, like the shape of a decrescendo. Repetitive motifs may evoke the folding and unfolding of paper art, and at the end, are completed, vanishing into the air like the point of the plane shape and the end of a crescendo.
Yang Bao: Red Crescendo (Yang Bao, piano; Yang Bao, synthesizer)
Other works by Bao also bring music and sound into the visual representations: his sound sculpture Superstar was not only inspired by the piano but is also an instrument that vibrates when affected by sound waves, amplifying the waves’ energy.
Yang Bao: Superstar, 2024
Made of 24K-gold coated steel, it functions as a super-instrument that responds to the invisible. Chance noises result in an ‘unpredictable symphony that mirrors the sound of the universe’. The resulting sound may sometimes be harmonious and sometimes discordant, but always represents the real world.
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