Yawen Wang

ISEA2015

Yawen Wang, Composer, Music Director, Interdisciplinary Artist, Asian Rain Werk inter/arts, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Described by Colin Thomas of Vancouver’s Georgia Straight as “a dancer at the keyboard”, Yawen Wang is an all-terrain interdisciplinary performance artist crossing over music, dance and theatre. A genre-defying artist, Yawen has created a body of work in the realms of music composition, gallery installation, performance art, musical theatre, music for dance, radio play, and film. Her representative works include Urinetown, The Musical! (Jessie Richardson Award, Best Production, 2007), Made in China (CBC/BBC Radio, 2004), Excursion (Jessie Nomination, Outstanding Original Musical, 1998), The Peach Project (cross-cultural opera, 2001) and The Difficult Mountain Paths of Szechwan (National Taiwan Symphony New Composition winner, 1992). In recent years, she had been commissioned a number of Podplays by the Neworld Theatre, Playwrights Theatre Centre and the Gateway Theatre. She was the recipient of the explorPERFORMANCE Award 2005, and has been a frequent nominee for various awards, including The Future Generation’s Millennium Award (Canada Council for the Arts, 2000) and the AMSSA Riasat Ali Khan Diversity Award (2005), which recognize and celebrate her contribution in the Arts, Culture and Diversity. Yawen thrives on the idea of polymath and polyrhythm : besides counting musically, she also counts numerically as a tax accountant.