The interview with Xie Rong, Daniel York Loh and Beibei Wang offers insight into the interdisciplinary development of Mountains and Seas – Song of Today. Drawing from the ancient Chinese text The Classic of Mountains and Seas, the artists emphasise a deliberate shift away from traditional mythological spectacle towards a contemporary, lived experience shaped by technology, politics and everyday life. Xie Rong describes the work as a process of transformation, combining seemingly unrelated elements such as AI, light, live painting and performance to create a fluid, collective artistic language.

Daniel York Loh frames the piece as a poetic and political response to current global crises, including climate change and social unrest. His writing adopts a fragmented, “album-like” structure, where individual scenes and voices accumulate into a broader reflection on humanity, urgency and resistance. Despite its darker themes, the work aims to energise audiences through humour, music and defiance.

For composer Beibei Wang, the Five Elements serve as both conceptual framework and musical method. Rather than composing in a conventional sense, she approaches sound as an embodied, intuitive process rooted in performance. Collaboration with Xie Rong and Daniel York Loh led her to simplify and refine the score, allowing space, silence and breath to become integral to the work.

Together, the artists describe a practice grounded in collaboration, experimentation and responsiveness, where myth, technology and contemporary politics intersect to form a dynamic and evolving performance language.

Link to the interview