The sounds of eastern essence
New album unites instruments from China and Japan in a unique melody
Pipa virtuoso Wu Man has made a new album with shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) performer Kojiro Umezaki. The album, titled Flow, was released on Feb 19.
Both musicians are members of the Silk Road Ensemble, a music project initiated by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 1998. The two musicians composed and performed five songs in the new album by combining folk tunes, contemporary styles and elements of improvisation, which seem to create a conversation between these two ancient Chinese and Japanese musical instruments.
Their solo and duo works on this album portray seasonal changes in a traditional Chinese garden, offering the listeners a unique musical experience.
“The Chinese pipa and Japanese shakuhachi are two of the most important and recognizable instruments in the East Asian musical tradition,” says Wu. “They both date back to ancient times, and each has its own unique story, sound, technique and expressive charm.”
She adds that the music on this new album draws upon a wide range of influences — from Chinese and Japanese folk tunes to the contemporary styles that the two musicians have each cultivated over the course of their careers.
“Improvisation and timbral interplay are also important elements throughout. The
shakuhachi has a distinctive sonority that always reminds me of autumn in Japan, while the lute-like pipa distinguishes itself through its characteristic tremolos and unique style of melodic ornamentation, among other qualities. Together, these two ancient musical instruments create a musical experience unlike any other,” says Wu.
Born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang’s provincial capital, and now based in San Diego, California, Wu is regarded as the ambassador of the Chinese
pipa in the West.
She began studying the instrument at age 9 and was enrolled at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing at 13.
As the country’s first recipient of a master’s degree in pipa at the conservatory, Wu moved to the US in 1990 to discover new sounds for her instrument.
The Grammy-nominated musician has imbued the 2,000-year-old, four-stringed Chinese lute with a contemporary twist, infusing it into a variety of genres, such as jazz, rock and electronic music. She also performs with symphony orchestras as well as contemporary dance and theater productions.
The Grammynominated musician has imbued the 2,000-year-old, four-stringed Chinese lute with a contemporary twist, infusing it into a variety of genres, such as jazz, rock and electronic music.
The album is a kind of sitespecific listening, Even if one can’t be there in person, the album might nudge the imagination to take in a full year at one of the extraordinary gardens in the world, in less than 40 minutes.” Kojiro Umezaki, Japanese-Danish performer and composer
According to Wu, the idea of the new album started with a music project she was commissioned to do in 2019 by the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, in San Marino, California. Wu was invited to compose and perform for a video installation work created by Chinese-American Tang Qingnnian against the backdrop of a spectacular 15-acre classical-style garden, Liu Fang Yuan, which is inspired by the gardens in Suzhou, East China’s Jiangsu province. The video installation, titled Fragrant Rhythms: The Seasons of Liu Fang Yuan, celebrates scenes from all four seasons in the garden.
“The album is a kind of sitespecific listening,” says Japanese-Danish performer and composer, Umezaki, who joined the Silk Road Ensemble in 2001, where he worked with Wu for the first time. “Even if one can’t be there in person, the album might nudge the imagination to take in a full year at one of the extraordinary gardens in the world, in less than 40 minutes.”
The album was recorded in January 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic hit, at the University of California, Irvine, where Umezaki currently works as an associate professor of music. Born in Tokyo, the musician works, teaches, and performs in the field of computer music technology.
The first piece, Winter (Night Thoughts II) is based on Wu’s composition for Tang’s video installation in 2019. The music piece for pipa was inspired by the Buddhist caves at Dunhuang, Gansu province, dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907).
The other music pieces started as improvisations between the two musicians.
Spring and Autumn are a duo performance while Summer is a pipa solo.
The closing piece, titled Bamboo, is a solo piece for the shakuhachi, which allows the listeners to step outside of seasons for a brief and suspended moment.
“With music, you can imagine the scenes of an eastern garden, such as the tranquility of snow and lively colors of summer,” says Wu.
Umezaki adds that for the two duo pieces on the album (Spring and Autumn), there are some musical strategies that are fairly evident when one listens to those tracks. When played together, they often let one person lead and the other person support. Then, when the one in the lead is finishing a passage, the other will provide materials to transition from a support to lead role.
“Because the pipa can articulate clear rhythms much more than the shakuhachi, Wu Man will find moments to transition into a musical passage with a discernible pulse. That creates the opportunity for the shakuhachi to find melodic material to play over the pipa’s rhythmic ideas,” Umezaki says.
An enormous grin spreads across her face. A photo of a girl with the bright smile holding a vial of Sinovac Biotech’s CoronaVac has become the focus of international media. As more countries embrace Chinese vaccines to fight COVID-19, I feel deeply honored that I photographed the girl and that photo has been published widely in the media.
On June 23, 2020, I was on a mission to photograph one of Sinovac Biotech’s laboratory in Beijing’s Shangdi area. Over the past two decades, the company has developed and commercialized six humanused vaccines and one animal vaccine, and advanced its R&D pipeline. During the filming, one of the personnel at Sinovac Biotech took out a novel coronavirus model and several vials of vaccines from his bag, and said that they could be used as props in my photos. I took the vaccine with a doubtful look, carefully examined it and said excitedly: “This is the real vaccine, the one that can be vaccinated?” “Yes, it has reached the second-phase clinical trial,” the man said.
After disinfection, we brought the flashlight into the laboratory for lighting and metering. And then we took a few photographs of their staff, but I couldn’t help thinking that there was something missing. At that very moment, a girl with an attractive smile came from outside, and upon asking I learned that the girl Li Yuexian is also a staff member of the laboratory. We invited her to work as a temporary model for the filming.
For a person without any modeling experience, she exudes full affinity with her smiling face, and I found that extremely precious. I didn’t ask her to pose much for the camera. I just told her to lift the vaccine vial up in front of her face. Then I started chatting with her. And her sensuous smile turned out to be even more touching than I expected. Her youthful sparkling eyes reflect spontaneous innocence to make you feel real sympathy and affection. This is the smile from the inside out, expressing true feelings, naturally and powerfully. This photo was later recognized and became a business card for Sinovac Biotech’s CoronaVac.
As a photographer who has been cooperating with Sinovac Biotech for more than 10 years, I have by far visited their COVID-19 vaccine production base eight times since 2020. In camera perspective, I have recorded the construction, equipment installation and commissioning, production, and transnational shipping at the vaccine production base. I have witnessed the birth of Sinovac Biotech’s CoronaVac.
When I visited Sinovac Biotech’s production base in Beijing’s Daxing district for the first time, I had realized that this was the very production workshop of the COVID-19 vaccine. At that time, all the facilities except for the building frame were under construction, and the production equipment was also being tested, installed, and debugged one after another.
The construction was well underway. The construction of the base started on March 29. By the time of my fifth visit on Oct 15, the office building had already taken on a new look. The first phase of the CoronaVac had already been completed and put into use, and the second phase was in full swing.
There were so many things I had great feelings of during the entire filming. After getting into the workshop, I had a real sense of walking through a maze because of the high similarity of the passages. Each area in the workshop is independent, and even the air is independently tested.
New protective clothing and disinfection are required when entering and exiting each area. Sometimes it is necessary to change more than 10 times in half a day, and there is this feeling of not knowing where you are. It is reported that in the crude liquid workshop where the highest level of protection is mandatory, even skilled staff will take more than 10 minutes to put on at least four layers of protection gear, and some require the assistance of colleagues.
By last November, the first batch of finished products of the CoronaVac were shipped from Sinovac Biotech’s Daxing production base to Brazil, and I recorded the whole process of the vaccine shipment.
Nantong, a coastal city in East China’s Jiangsu province, has been optimizing the operation of its economic development zones to pursue quality development. The city’s efforts have yielded outstanding results.
The city released a guideline in 2020 to strengthen the administration and development of its economic zones. According to the guidelines, economic zones in Nantong had been facing problems with size and efficiency. The guidelines were set to promote the integration of resources by separating government service functions from economic zones and stimulating the vitality of regional economic systems and mechanisms.
Continuous reforms
Directed by the guidelines, some provincial-level economic zones in Nantong merged neighboring, smaller industrial parks which were engaging in similar industries in 2020. The provincial-level zones were responsible for allocation of resources, investment promotion, management and construction after the mergers.
Meanwhile, every development zone has set up a core area of about 30 square kilometers to prioritize developments for the next five to 10 years.
Each development zone also managed to focus on one or two key industries while cultivating one or two emerging industries based on its resources and economic development foundation. For instance, the Nantong Economic & Technological Development Area saw the next generation of information technology and healthcare industries growing rapidly. Tongzhou Bay also reported strong growth in its port economy.
Measures have also been taken to create a better business environment for investors. More actions have been taken to streamline onestop services and administration in economic zones to bring more benefits to enterprises. The Nantong city government delegated 916 administrative permits across nine economic zones last year. Among the zones to receive the permits, the Suzhou-Wuxi-Nantong Science and Technology Park was granted 578 permits to cover a wide range of industries by the end of 2020. New performance evaluation and award models were also implemented.
Performance evaluations will be carried out in every economic zone on a quarterly, half-yearly and annual basis, according to local officials.
Excellent outcomes
After taking about one year of effort, economic zones in Nantong, especially some newly integrated ones, maintained growth in 2020 despite the COVID-19 outbreak.
Nantong International Home Textile Park, established by merging the China Dieshiqiao International Home Textiles and Tongzhou Zhihao Market, reported a combined trading value of 230.1 billion yuan ($35.59 billion) in 2020, up 4 percent from 2019. The park utilized online sales to bring in 85 billion yuan in revenue, up 19 percent on the previous year.
The new economic zone is showing strong vitality and prosperity in the Year of the Ox. Through Feb 28, the 15th day of the first month on Chinese lunar calendar, which marked the end of the Spring Festival celebrations, 80 percent of industrial enterprises above designated size — meaning they have an annual revenue of 20 million yuan or more, resumed production.
Su-Xi-Tong Science and Technology Park in Nantong was established in November through the combination of the Suzhou-Nantong and Wuxi-Nantong industrial parks. The new park is set to be a national-level demonstration zone that promotes cross-Yangtze River integrated development.
New projects have landed in the zone during the last few months. One such example involves Xinlin International Group, a supplier for leading companies such as Uniqlo and Aeon, which signed up to develop a medical material production project on Dec 12. The annual sales revenue of the new project is estimated to reach 1 billion yuan. The integrated economic zone also signed investment agreements with German Karcher and Gaoda High-Tech to build a development site for automated vehicle-cleaning robots.
On Jan 15, 31 new projects covering smart manufacturing, electronic information, life and health, and modern service industries began construction in the Su-XiTong Science and Technology Park with total investment of 26.8 billion yuan. By the end of the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), regional GDP of the park was set to reach 30 billion yuan, according to Wang Kai, Party secretary of the park.
By the end of February, Nantong boasted 17 economic zones at the provincial level or above, including four national-level economic and technological development areas, and one national-level hightech area.
Bright future
In 2021, Nantong will further upgrade its economic zones in hopes of continuing to move forward with development.
“We will accelerate introducing new policies, strengthen technology innovation and foster more industrial clusters to boost economic and social development,” said an official from Nantong’s commerce bureau.
Officials from the commerce bureau said the city will promote further opening-up of development zones, technological and production upgrades in traditional industries and support enterprises to expand industrial chains. More measures will be taken to attract world-leading companies to economic zones in Nantong as officials aim to form globally competitive industrial clusters. Nantong will support the development of industrial parks, which were jointly developed by both Chinese and foreign investors. It will also strengthen business ties with neighboring Shanghai.
Nantong, a prosperous economic hub in East China and a gateway to Shanghai, made great strides in its economic output during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (201620). It was one of six new entrants to the “1-trillion-yuan GDP club” in China in 2020. The 1-trillion-yuan benchmark is often perceived as a notion of economic prowess. Shanghai was the first city in the country to hit the mark, back in 2006.
During the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), Nantong will work to boost innovation and entrepreneurship and become a hub of advanced manufacturing in the Yangtze River Delta region, with a comprehensive transportation network.
The city will move toward highquality economic growth by building world-class advanced manufacturing industrial clusters, optimizing the local industrial structure, deepening reforms and opening-up, promoting technology innovation, attracting more professionals, facilitating regional cooperation, and improving the business environment.
Nantong will also work toward environmentally friendly development by optimizing the use of natural resources, emphasizing environmental protection, strengthening environmental management, and promoting an environmentally friendly lifestyle.