Shaw Pong LiuViolinist and composer Shaw Pong Liu engages diverse communities with creative music and social dialogue by innovating the audience experience of live music. Collaborating with artists from a wide range of disciplines, Shaw Pong creates genre-defying performances which interplay written and improvised music with storytelling and movement.
Her current project, Sunbar, seeks to create a mobile solarium to connect Bostonians with sunlight, warmth, and each other during cold winter months. Recent projects include Water Graffiti for Peace, a series of outdoor Chinese water calligraphy sessions inviting public play and conversations about peace; A Bird a Day, exploring birdsong, sunrises and composition (resulting in a site-specific composition for 18 solo string players in three tiers of balconies); and Soldiers’ Tales Untold, a musical-narrative production mixing veterans’ stories, live music, and audience dialogue about war. In addition to violin, she also performs as a vocalist, erhu (Chinese violin) player, and even as an aerialist (aerial silks with Whistler in the Dark theatre company’s production of “Tales From Ovid”). |
Shaw Pong is founder of the 99% String Quartet and SQUEE (String Quartets Everywhere), bringing live string quartets to cafes, subways and other public spaces in Boston. An avid explorer of new sounds, she has received commissions from A Far Cry, Lorelei Ensemble, and Dialogue Chamber Music, and she has premiered new works with groups including Bang-On-A-Can All-Stars, MIT’s Gamelan GalakTika, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. She is a teaching artist for the Silk Road Project, the Urbano Project, Young Audiences of Massachusetts and the New England Conservatory of Music.
A graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a Masters in Violin Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, Shaw Pong was one of ten artists selected for the Expression Boston public art fellowship in 2014-15, and one of two artist-ethnographers selected to interpret the City of Boston's cultural planning initiative, Boston Creates, in 2015.
A graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a Masters in Violin Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, Shaw Pong was one of ten artists selected for the Expression Boston public art fellowship in 2014-15, and one of two artist-ethnographers selected to interpret the City of Boston's cultural planning initiative, Boston Creates, in 2015.