Magazine

Liu Fang’s mastery of the pipa and the guzheng has established her international reputation as one of the great young interpreters of traditional Chinese music. She aspires to combine her knowledge and practice of Eastern traditions and Western classical music, contemporary music and improvisation, thereby creating new forms, uniting different cultures and discovering new audiences.

Berlin, Paris, New York—such exciting places to be during the 1920s, an era variously known as “The Jazz Age” or “The Roaring Twenties,” but certainly never The Age of Innocence, which was merely the title of a book, albeit one of Edith Wharton's most successful tomes.

Keenly aware that Germany had no colonial presence in Asia, Heinrich Heine observed in 1821 that, while Portuguese, English and Dutch commercial ships might transport the material riches of India to the West, Germany would not fail to mine its spiritual treasures.

People have always been drawn to the idea of a child, a miniature person, performing at an adult level. The preternaturally gifted child becomes a small-scale replica of an adult, with the skill and power to gain the respect and attention of adult society. From the child prodigy’s point of view, however, the situation appears otherwise.