THE JINGWEI BIRD explores the complexity of climate change and our relationship to the planet through multi-disciplinary performances with Del Sol Quartet and The Last Hoisan Poets.
The project is centered around three pop-up poetry and music performances— two outdoor shows in San Francisco and Alameda county, and one in San Francisco’s Chinatown in August 2023. “THE JINGWEI BIRD” will weave brand-new music by Asian-American composers with powerful bilingual poetry, using storytelling and mythology to deepen our understanding and awareness of the nature around us.
Performance Dates
The Jingwei Bird @ India Basin Waterfront Park
SUNDAY, October 29, 2023, 3:30pm – 4:30pm, India Basin Waterfront Park in San Francisco, (near The Lab), Hunters Point Blvd and Hawes St., San Francisco, CA (click for Google Map)
SATURDAY, AUGUST 19, 2023, FREE public performance 1pm – 2pm, Seaplane Lagoon Promenade, 1801 Ferry Point, Alameda, CA 94501.
With a special pre-performance talk by artist Leon Sun, presented at 11:30am, in partnership with DOER Marine Deep Ocean Explorer Store, 650 W Tower Ave, Alameda, with light refreshments to follow at Seaplane Lagoon Promenade picnic area #1, 12:30pm-1:00pm.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18, 2023, 1pm – 2pm, North East Medical Services Chinatown PACE Center, San Francisco. Special performance for seniors served by NEMS PACE Center in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
This event is sponsored in part by grants from Grants for the Arts and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.
THE JINGWEI BIRD features new poetry written and performed by The Last Hoisan Poets.
“THE JINGWEI BIRD” is a mythical creature that appears in the Shan-hai jing, The Classic of Mountains and Seas, a Chinese classic text (third century BC to second century AD) and compilation of mythic geography and beasts. The story of the Jingwei Bird involves Nüwa, a girl who is drowned and transformed into a bird, determined to fill up the sea one pebble at a time to protect others from perishing as she did. The story captures the importance of perseverance, even against seemingly impossible odds, and reminds us of our vital connection to the planet.
References to the Jingwei Bird can be found in the poetry carved by Chinese immigrants into the barrack walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station.
Continuing the collaboration begun with The Angel Island Project, Chinese-American poets Genny Lim and Nellie Wong join the quartet to create this new program of music and poetry exploring themes of eco-futurism, climate change, and our relationship to the planet. By immersing audiences in the sound of the music, delicately woven together in conversation with the poetry, the artists acknowledge the importance of community storytelling and the sharing of cultural knowledge across generations.
THE JINGWEI BIRD music, by Asian-American composers who draw on their cultural heritage, will be curated and performed by the Del Sol Quartet.
Benjamin Kreith & Hyeyung Sol Yoon, violins; Charlton Lee, viola; Kathryn Bates, cello. Photo: AFW Productions.
Fascinated by the feedback loop between social change, technology, and artistic innovation, the San Francisco-based Del Sol Quartet is a leading force in 21st-century chamber music. They believe that live music can, and should, happen anywhere – whether introducing Ben Johnston’s microtonal Americana at the Library of Congress or in a canyon cave, taking Aeryn Santillan’s gun-violence memorial to the streets of the Mission District, or collaborating with Huang Ruo and the anonymous Chinese poets who carved their words into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station. Since 1992, Del Sol has commissioned and premiered thousands of new works.
COMPOSERS
Photo by Duo Huang
Kui Dong is a professor of Music Composition and served as Department of Music Chair (2018-2020) at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Dong’s compositions span diverse genres and styles that include ballet, orchestral and chamber works, chorus, electro-acoustic music, film scores, multi-media art, and free improvisation. Her works written in the United States show a unique synthesis of influences from avant-garde experimental, jazz, and other ethnic music, and at the same time maintain a profound respect to Western classical music and a deep cultural connection with her roots. She sometimes incorporates theatre, as well as Chinese and non-western instruments and musical concepts into contemporary settings. https://www.kuidong.net/
Photo by Ben Tarquin
Erika Oba is a composer, pianist/flutist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer she has written works for big band, small jazz ensembles, chamber groups, dance and theater. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and performs with her own groups the Erika Oba Trio, Ends Meat’ Catastrophe Jazz Ensemble, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble. In 2018, she was a composer fellow with the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music and worked with the Del String Quartet. She is a 2023 fellow in the inaugural cohort of the Asian Improv Arts Fellowship program. https://erikaoba.com/
Photo by Wenjun Miakoda Liang
Huang Ruo has been lauded by The New York Times for having “a distinctive style.” His vibrant and inventive musical voice draws equal inspiration from Chinese ancient and folk music, Western avant-garde, experimental, noise, natural and processed sound, rock, and jazz to create a seamless, organic integration using a compositional technique he calls “Dimensionalism.” Huang Ruo’s diverse compositional works span from orchestra, chamber music, opera, theater, and dance, to cross-genre, sound installation, architectural installation, multimedia, experimental improvisation, folk rock, and film. https://huangruo.com/
Meilina Tsui is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, advocate for youth artistic development, and educator based in Orlando, Florida. Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan and raised in Hong Kong, Meilina is a composer who “popularizes Kazakh music tradition” (Kazakhstan International News Agency, Kazinform) and creates works that uniquely combine elements of Central Asian and East Asian cultures. She is the first Chinese classical composer of Dungan ethnicity whose music has been gaining international recognition. https://www.meilinatsui.com/
THE JINGWEI BIRD Presenting Partners
India Basin Waterfront Park, San Francisco – Sunday, August 20, 2023, 3:30pm – 4:30pm
The India Basin Waterfront Park project is a partnership between Rec and Park, Trust for Public Land, San Francisco Parks Alliance, A. Philip Randolph Institute, and the Bayview-Hunters Point community.
The India Basin Waterfront Park project is guided by an Equitable Development Plan (EDP), a first for San Francisco. It ensures that the waterfront park will benefit current Bayview-Hunters Point (BVHP)
residents while preserving the culture and identity of the historic neighborhood. It provides a blueprint for delivering a park designed by and for the community while improving economic opportunity and
environmental health for its residents.
For more, visit https://ibwaterfrontparks.com/
Seaplane Lagoon Promenade, Alameda – Saturday, August 19, 2023
Based in Alameda, California, DOER Marine (Deep Ocean Exploration and Research) was founded in 1992 by Dr. Sylvia Earle as Deep Ocean Exploration and Research, a marine consulting firm. The company is now headed by her daughter, Liz Taylor along with subsea specialist Ian Griffith, who expanded the firm’s scope and capabilities to include ROV and submersible support services. DOER Marine committed to changing the way we think about oceans, and the creatures who call them home. Partnership with DOER Marine will support our project efforts to engage audiences in Alameda and San Francisco more deeply in thinking about their relationship with water, including our Bay and ocean.
Those attending the 8/19 Alameda performance are invited to stop by the Deep Ocean Explorer Store, located at 650 W Tower Ave, Alameda, CA 94501, a short walk away from Seaplane Lagoon Promenade.
San Francisco Chinatown – Friday, August 18, 2023
North East Medical Services (NEMS) will host a performance at their Chinatown PACE Center (Program for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly) as part of promoting well-being and community for the elderly. NEMS is one of the largest community health centers in the United States targeting the medically underserved population. Based in San Francisco, the non-profit community health center offers comprehensive health care services to a variety of patients, a majority of whom are uninsured or low income. NEMS offers linguistically competent and culturally sensitive health care services in many languages and dialects, including English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Toishan, Vietnamese, Burmese, Korean, Spanish, and Hindi.
COLLABORATING ARTISTS
Leon Sun is a San Francisco based printmaker, photographer, painter, and writer. His art came out of the anti-war and social movements of the 1960s and 70s. He had always wanted his art to be socially relevant. Up until the 1990s he worked as photographer and graphic designer for Left publications while holding down various “day jobs.”
He first learned screenprinting in 1979 at the Japantown Art and Media (JAM) Workshop in San Francisco. He has printed continuously up to the current period. His work was based mostly in the Asian American Movement, but he has also contributed to international solidarity actions.
Around 2000 he began to relocate his art from political activism to spiritual practice. He took a break from the visual arts and began to teach himself landscape art. He spent three years building a garden informed by Buddhism, Asian and indigenous cultures. This experience did much to formulate a new orientation for his art. In 2013 Sun set up his own print studio and began to produce art that expresses his love for nature and concern for the environment.
Leon Sun was born 1948 in Shanghai, China, migrated to Hong Kong in 1957 and moved to the United States in 1966. He lives with his wife Karen and their dog Rocky in San Francisco and works out of his home. His work has been shown nationally and around the San Francisco Bay Area.
Terrastories: a tool for place-based storytelling
Terrastories are audiovisual recordings of place-based storytelling. This application enables local communities to locate and map their oral storytelling traditions about places of significant meaning or value to them.
Special thanks to Terrastories, for helping us to share our journey with you.
Explore Terrastories allows you to access the maps of communities who have chosen to make a selection of their stories public. We invite you to dive in and learn more by exploring the sounds & stories gathering on Jingwei’s Journey.
https://explore.terrastories.app/community/jingweis_journey
Terrastories is entirely free and open-source, built with principles of offline-first and data sovereignty, and aligned with the following two UN Sustainable Development Goals:
Explore Terrastories offers a whole new interface that is similar to the one used locally but is open to anyone interested in navigating it online or offline. Most Terrastories users are Earth Defenders and Indigenous peoples like the Wayana in Suriname, the Aparai, Isolados Akurio, Isolados do Rio Citaré, Katxuyana, Tiriyó e Wayana in Tumucumaque territory in Brazil, or the Haudenosaunee community at the Six-Nations Reserve in Canada. However, uses have also expanded to diverse kinds of communities, such as that of the Chinese diaspora community that extends from China to the Bay Area in San Francisco.
These and other communities are nurturing Explore Terrastories as a new growing window to a diversity of place-based stories that they consider important to share and position in this shared map. As Rudo Kemper, founder of Terrastories explains,
“This is a way to visualize a different kind of traditional knowledge, which can be stories, poetry, and song. It is also about visibility and representation, with the ability to control what gets represented”.