Harvard University
Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry PhD Portfolio
(Haotian Wang)
As a Hani ethnic minority artist from Yunnan, China, my creative practice as a songwriter, performer, sound artist and interdisciplinary artist is rooted in scholarly inquiries, genre-bending works, artistic collaborations, and cross-cultural dialogues. This portfolio represent my artistic missions and guiding principles as an artist, along with recorded releases, integrative sound projects, and live performances. For a more complete overview of my artistic work, please refer to my CV as well as other sections on this official website.
*The portfolio contains external GoogleDoc links to scholarly writing sample.
Table of Contents:
[Artist Bio]
[Music Album: The Bridge in The Mountain's Hands (A Travelog)]
[Music Album: Story of the Leaves]
[Transdisciplinary Art Project: "Tea Room"]
[Transdisciplinary Performance: "Tea: Story of the Leaves"]
[Music EP: EVE]
[Music Conmission: Riddle Or - A Child's Bestiary of Mountains and Seas]
[Ambisonic Composition: Strange Tale from a Chinese Studio]
[Writing Sample]
ARTIST BIO
Haotian Wang is a multidisciplinary artist and independent musician from Yunnan, China, currently based in Chicago. His art indicates the evolution from a Hani ethnic minority to a global citizen in intercultural dialogues. Focusing on humanities, his works elaborate on daily encounters from tea ceremonies to border town fairs, and collect them as poetic assemblages. Referencing classical Chinese poetry and folklore in Yunnan, he aims to reframe overlooked traditions and transform them into novel sensorial experiences.
Haotian’s debut music album The Bridge in The Mountain's Hands (A Travelog) (2022), selected as a “Bandcamp New and Notable Album,” is an enveloping travelog combining Chinese folk music, ambient, and spoken-words-poetry. The sophomore album Story of the Leaves, released on Dec 6, 2024, further explores ethnographic songwriting integrating ambient pop, indie folk, new age, and Chinese folk music, with sparkles of field recordings and poetry.
As a regular performer, he has been featured in the Chicago Laboratory for Electro-Acoustic Theatre (CLEAT), Zhou B Art Center, Breaking Sounds Unpublished Series, and Leesta Vall Recordings Direct-to-Vinyl Live Sessions. As he toured and performed in Chicago and New York, he realized his role as a performer and storyteller. Through these performances, he seeks shared connections between city and nature, Eastern and Western philosophy, sound art and music. By interweaving these dualities into a collective “story,” Haotian celebrates the idea of connection and exchange—artistically, culturally, and geographically. The worlds are not that far apart, and our story unfolds together.
1. MUSIC ALBUM: The Bridge in the Mountain's Hands (A Travelog) (2022)
In 2014, I was on a road trip to a border town in my hometown Yunnan, China, where I saw a bridge naturally formed in the hands of two mountains. The writing of this album started last year when I unlocked that part of my memory and my cultural identity from the Hani ethnic group. I never thought I would finish such a folk-centric album in a cosmopolitan city like New York City 8 years later.
The album begins and concludes with vivid pictures: "Sunrise Sunset (Intro)" and “Sunset Sunrise (Outro)”. “We Might” vividly paints a global village with samples of voices, saxophone, and indie rock elements. Tracks of “Clouds” and “Border Town Fair” invite listeners to observe Yunnan’s everyday life, while “Terrace Fields” and "Cabin" show how he naturally blends Chinese folk melodies with ambient textures. "Suitcase" serves as a melodic companion for introspective moments on the ride home.
Sample Excerpt#1: "Terrace Fields" (3.5 min)
“Terrace Fields” is a new-age ambient instrumental piece I created in September 2021. I intended to use immersive audio storytelling to navigate a meditative walk on the terrace fields. I fused synthesizers with acoustic folk instruments like Hulusi Flute, Dizi, Gong, and steel drums in the vibrant passage in the outro. Besides diverse instrumentation, I incorporated field recordings into each track. I manipulated echoes of hi-hats and wood blocks to imitate the percussive sound of rain while panning sounds around to reach an immersive effect. I also included the recorded sounds of footsteps and flowing water to imagine a walk passing the rice fields as the sun crosses the mountain.
Sample Excerpt#2: "Border Town Fair" (4.5 min)
“Border Town Fair” is a piece of experimental folktronica songwriting. I strived to create a kaleidoscope feeling that takes listeners to a vibrant border town in Yunnan. I created layers out of folk instruments, strings, percussions, and synths, integrating Yunnan traditional folk music and capturing an immersive sonic journey of the border town fair.
2. MUSIC ALBUM: Story of the Leaves (2024)
Kunming, Mengzi, Jinping, New York, Shanghai, Berlin, Chicago… Moving between places has deeply nourished my creative work. From Ring Roads to Empty Freeways, the East Coast to the Rhine River, these places hold different symbolic meanings for me. As I navigate my life journey while traveling and living in different cities and continents, I find myself observing the encounters and stories along the way. The ever-changing surroundings have continually pushed me to reconstruct my understanding of the relationship between people, time, and space.
With Story of the Leaves, my songwriting blends ambient pop, indie folk, and Chinese folk-inspired music, sprinkled with field recordings and spoken words. Inspired by space-poems, my lyrics remain temporal, visceral, and poetic, aiming to create an immersive sonic experience for listeners. The album encompasses nine original songs written between 2020 and 2023, marking a transition from solitary bedroom production to dynamic studio collaborations with musicians worldwide. Over half of the album features my friends and collaborators—instrumentalists, audio engineers, and performers I’ve met in New York and Chicago—each contributing their unique touch to the project.
Sample Excerpt: "Halzeilpyu (Direction)" (4 min)
(Written in Jinping, Yunnan)
In the summer of 2023, I started to learn the Hani ethnic language, part of my heritage, despite not finding any teachers within my family or community. I turned to online tutorials and dictionaries to write this song, which is inspired by the story of my ancestors searching for their direction. The title “Halzeilpyu” can be translated as “asking for direction”. When writing this song, I was also reading a book from the hotel I stayed in Jinping, and it narrates stories about People’s lives have changed ever since there’s roads and highways into the mountains. The singing style in the chorus is inspired by Hani rice planting folk song in Yunnan, China.
3. TRANSDISCIPLINARY ART PROJECT: Tea Room
"Humanities has met in a teacup."
Weaving a variety of mediums together—including sound installation, sculpture, happening, podcast, poetry, and performance—Wang strives to capture the multi-sensory, healing experience of tea-drinking. Tea Room serves as an embodiment of the pre and post colonial history, aesthetic, philosophy, and identity politics of tea and tea-drinking. Through the investigation of navigating one’s personal identity, he uses this project to address the evolution from ethnic minority to global citizen in intercultural dialogues.
Part 1. Songs of Seven Cups
Based on a Tang-Dynasty Chinese poem by Lu Tong: “Songs of Seven Cups,” I was inspired to create seven sound pieces. The titles are named after each cup of tea and the embodied meanings in each stanza. Combining found sounds, field recordings, and ambient textures, I navigate how tea can bring the serenity of mind and harmony with surroundings as well as the intersection of poetry and tea rituals.
English Translation: (by Haotian)
"Songs of Seven Cups"
一碗喉吻润，The first cup of tea kisses the throat;
二碗破孤闷。The second cup shatters the wall of solitude;
三碗搜枯肠，唯有文字五千卷。The third cup explores the dry stream and opens up the poetry of my soul;
四碗发轻汗，平生不平事尽向毛孔散。The fourth cup evaporates with the rest of world;
五碗肌骨清，The fifth cup penetrates and sharpens the body;
六碗通仙灵。The sixth cup calling;
七碗吃不得也，唯觉两腋习习清风生。And the seventh cup slowly sits steaming; the wind under my skin.
Sample Excerpt: "Songs of Seven Cups" - Cup3 (1.5 min)
Part 2: Tea PotCast
Following the seven-cup narrative in "Songs of Seven Cups," I created seven additional podcast clips in Part II. I decided to expand my tea project through the lens of cross-cultural communication and globalization. As a global citizen traveling across different continents, I made a series of tea podcasts as an introspection on identity conflicts, immigration, and cultural assimilation after talking to friends and strangers surround me. The podcast’s narrative form allows me to capture an authentic glimpse of how people navigate their identities in the globalized world. To explore the complexity of translation, I blended the dialogue in Chinese and English together and used different mediums to across language barrier.
The naming of each “Leaf” episode is inspired by The Classic of Tea (茶经), the earliest and most famous documentation of tea written by Lu Yu. According to Chinese-English Tea Studies Terminology, there are three scrolls and ten chapters about tea: “一之源 Origin, 二之具 Tools, 三之造 Making, 四之器 Utensil, 五之煮Boiling, 六之飲 Drinking, 七之事 History, 八之出 Growing Regions, 九之略 Simplify, and 十之图 Pictorialize” (Lu-Yu Tea Culture Institute).
Sample Excerpt: Leaf#2 Simplify 略 (1.5 min)
(Soprano + Alto Saxophone by Roy Nathanson)
(Dialogue with Claire Zhang)
4. TRANSDISCIPLINARY Performance:
"Tea: Story of the Leaves"
Performance Sample Excerpt#1: Cup4 Evaporating (1 min)
As part of the Chicago Laboratory for Electro-Acoustic Theatre (CLEAT) Listening and Performance Series, this 75-minute performance uses the 16-Channel audio system with a live band ambient set (featuring my music and sound works, poetry, installation, and a traditional tea ceremony). I aim to create an embodied experience that creates an open, communal space for deep listening, meditation, healing, and intercultural understanding.
Artistic Collaborations involve:
I. Xiao Qin, Chicago-based artist, designed ceramic teacups in the shape of leaves for this show.
II. Living Water Tea House provides a tea ceremony for each performance as well as an intermission talk about tea culture, the story behind selected tea at the performance to cultivate understanding of Chinese tea culture.
5. Music EP: EVE by Parallel EVE
(Electronic Duo with Emma Zhang)
Parallel EVE is an electronic duo that fuses multiple genres- post-punk, electronic, indie rock, impressionism, and sampling. Band members include two independent artists: Yaojiu19 and Haotian. Our academic background beyond music (Yaojiu19 is science history and Haotian's is humanities) strongly influenced our concepts. In this way, Parallel EVE's music covers discussions including but not limited to science, technology, human, and nature.
We applied German playwright Bertolt Brecht's theory of alienation effect to the EP concepts. That being said, our songs serve as the script, while we are the performers who play the role we created but stay alienated from the characters as narrators. We aimed to create an RPG-like world that connects all of our works through non-linear narration
Sample Excerpt: "New Age Puppy" - (3.5 min)
"New Age Puppy" is the opening track on this EP, which demonstrates our band's philosophy in creating sonic collages. We want the opening track to serve the role of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland to guide audiences to jump through the hole and enter the land of Parallel EVE. The creative process started with a steady, danceable bass groove. We added synth arpeggios, pads, and bells that serve melodies as if putting together each puzzle piece. Then we decided to build upon the motif with an unusual rhythmic section, including claps, hi-hats, cowbells, toms, and African Gankoqui. All instruments are midi-based and embody progressive electronic elements. Harmonically, we played with key modulations to break the audience's expectations while keeping rhythmic momentum.
6. Music Commission:
Riddle Or - A Child's Bestiary of Mountains and Seas
Sample Excerpt: (3min)
Geographically complies hundreds of plants and beasts, the Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shan Hai Jing) may have existed as early as the Pre-Qin Period. At the intersection of Chinese mythology and natural history, the film explores the relationship between the form of child drawings and the representation of historical texts. I composed and mixed the score for this animation with my bandmate Emma Zhang.
Credit List:
Animation/Multichannel Installation by Runfeng Qiu
Installed at RISD Auditorium Blue Studio
Co-composed by Haotian Wang & Emma Zhang
Showcased on worldwide Film Festivals: Cinanima (Portugal) / BISFF (China) / Rockaway Film Festival / Anibar International Animation Festival
7. Ambisonic Composition
Strange Tale from a Chinese Studio
Sample Excerpt: (5min)
This is an ambient electronic composition in which I strived to reinvent the Chinese classic “supernatural” fiction titled Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Songling Pu (Qing Dynasty). The piece focuses on the story of Yingning, The Half-Fox Girl. This was originally composed in Logic Pro, then rendered into ambisonic-B format in Reaper. The composition attempts to tell an immersive story sonically via ambisonics while exploring the possibility of creating music in ambisonics. The ambisonic composition was played in the 12.1 system.
8. Writing Samples
Sample Writing#1: "From Archive to Screen: Gong Linna's Sound Map and Digital Ethnography"
This essay aims to evaluate the ethics of video archive Sound Map on Chinese ethnic minority music and provide new conceptualization of the "halfie artist-scholar" model.
Sample Writing#2: “Listening to the City: Urban Investigation Through Soundscape and Soundwalk”
This essay explores soundwalks as a methodology to study the Vietnamese multicultural center and ethnic enclave in Berlin, providing an intervention using soundwalk as an interdisciplinary approach to humanities and social sciences research.