Hearing What Has Yet to Sound

A Conversation with Zhuyang Liu on Guzheng, Breath, and the Art of Listening Before Sound

Interview / Edited by Xiao Han
Published in the Music as a Vessel of the Way Musician Feature, Spring 2025

First published on the official website of Zhuyang Liu. This text has been edited from a conversation recorded in spring 2025.

Han: You are often seen as an artist who builds bridges between a deep grounding in Chinese musical traditions and contemporary performance and experimental sound. How do you balance these two aspects of your practice?

Zhuyang: I don’t really see them as opposites. For me, tradition isn’t a fixed system. It breathes — it simply needs to be listened to carefully.

I grew up within the northern-school tradition of guzheng, where the measure of a gesture, and of silence, can be just as important as the sound itself. Over time, I began to realise that these structures could unfold again in completely different spaces — in major international venues, underground music spaces, museums, parks, or through improvisation. They can find their voice again wherever they are placed.

What I carry with me is perhaps a habit of listening — knowing how to wait, and how to be ready before a sound has even appeared.

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Han: You often speak about “breath”, “space” and “timbre” not as secondary elements of music, but as its foundations. What do you mean by that?

Zhuyang: In my own playing, sound isn’t something you add. It is a space that you enter.

Breath itself can become structure. A single note can be like a stroke of calligraphy, or a line of poetry — it carries weight. The space between one sound and the next matters just as much. That kind of syntax isn’t ornamental. There is something ethical about it. It asks for restraint, clarity, and respect for the material.

In guzheng performance, the physical movement between gestures creates its own kind of silence. That silence can hold so much thought and energy before the next sound arrives. Sometimes I feel that these breaths are somehow louder than the notes themselves.

That way of sensing sound has stayed with me, whether I am composing or improvising.

Han: You have performed at the British Museum, as well as at important experimental venues such as Cafe OTO. How do you understand the place of the guzheng within these very different contexts?

Zhuyang: I think of it as a kind of quiet disturbance.

It isn’t loud or forceful, but it changes perception. The guzheng doesn’t need to shout. It makes itself heard in another way.

When I perform in spaces like these, I’m not simply presenting an instrument. I’m bringing another logic of time into the room. For me, there is a very subtle kind of politics in that — allowing non-Western experiences of time and ways of carrying memory to coexist within a contemporary space, and to participate in shaping its atmosphere.

At the same time, the cultural histories carried by an instrument can be redefined through sound. The listening space doesn’t have to belong to one culture or one history. Everyone can find their own place within it — their own way of listening and feeling.

Han: You also studied Western instruments such as piano, guitar and flute from a young age. How has that influenced the way you play today?

Zhuyang: They gave me another map.

Western instruments taught me different ways of thinking about structure and layers. Through that, I began to look at music itself almost as a material — something shaped by different histories and cultures. And when I returned to Chinese music with that perspective, I found it extraordinary.

More than anything, it gave me a greater appreciation for, and humility towards, the enormous breadth of musical and artistic traditions in the world.

So for me, the important thing isn’t what I learnt from one side or the other. It is that I learnt how to listen to both at once.

I’m not trying to “fuse” traditions. I simply allow them to sound within one another, and see what other possibilities might emerge.

Han: If someone asked you, “What is your music about?”, how would you answer?

Zhuyang: Presence.

The structures that often go unnoticed but are always there — shaping how we speak, how we listen, how we feel.

And sometimes, it is simply about the vibration of a single string.