18 Songs of a Nomad Flute

In this duo performance, Ruiqi Wang and Claire Gross explore the destructive yet creative power of lightning – using the tragic life of Cai Wenji, an artist of the Han Dynasty, as an example.

A string snaps. A bolt of lightning strikes. What might emerge from the crash? As a child, the future poet and musician Cai Wenji (177–249) heard a string snap on her father’s guqin, the zither. «The second string», she said. Another snapped. «The fourth!» On both occasions she was right, as recounted in the 6th-century book «Record of Young Prodigies».

In this intense experience, this moment of rupture, writes the young composer Ruiqi Wang, Wenji entered history. Her life, she says, was an echo of that rupture. What followed was war, captivity and twelve years of exile – as shattering as a bolt of lightning. Yet, as the duality suggests, a bolt of lightning can also illuminate paths to creativity. Out of her loss, Wenji created the «Eighteen Songs of a Nomad’s Flute», in which grief became a creative force.

In their duo performance, composer and performer Ruiqi Wang and visual artist Claire Gross explore the fractures in Wenji’s life story. Her poem appears and dissolves almost immediately: sighed, shouted, distorted. Live sounds and electronic music clash. And the installation, sewn from rice paper, canvas and diary pages, also speaks of the fragility of life.