2025 Works
> HomeA Bench Grows in the Wild
Still Picture Scoring from the Scavenging photograph collection
A Bench Grows in the Wild takes inspiration from a photograph of an old bench surrounded by overgrown shrubs and trees. The piece blends world, electronic, and traditional symphonic instruments to evoke the slow transformation of a manmade object as it’s reclaimed by nature. What begins as stillness and rust gives way to motion and renewal, reflecting the quiet, ongoing relationship between the human and natural worlds — a reminder that everything, in time, returns to the earth.
Scavenging is my third photography book, a quiet reflection on three years of image-making. Divided into three chapters—2020, South Shore, and Crossing the Bridge—it traces a personal and collective memory shaped by isolation, youth, and change.
captures fragments from daily walks during lockdown, when the world slowed down to silence.South Shore refers to a small community in Yanjiao, where I lived alone during my final years of school. Surrounded by friends and neighbors, we cooked, drank, talked, and studied together—a brief, tender world recorded not by camera, but by phone: simple, direct, and sincere.
As The Sheltering Sky reminds us, certain afternoons become inseparable from who we are; these images hold that kind of memory.
Crossing the Bridge reflects the passage between Beijing and Yanjiao, a border charged with exams, restrictions, and fleeting hope.
Together, these photographs form an intimate diary of resilience and belonging amid uncertain times.
Artist: Jinmao Xiang 向锦茂
Born in 2001 and currently based in Beijing, they are studying Graphic Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Their work focuses on book design, photography, and image research. Exhibition history: 2023 "The Bridge of Arts," Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp; 2024 "Beyond Value—Uncommissioned Design Production," UCCA; 2024 "If You Lived Here," Beijing; 2024 "Foodscapes—From Field to Table," Taishun, Wenzhou; [Participation] 2024 "Jingmai Mountain: Sketching, Deep Description, and Imagination," Sinan Mansions, Shanghai.
Composer: Barbara Macz
Barbara Macz composes in an eclectic style that combines pop, electronic, and acoustic sounds. Her work focuses on songwriting as a way to explore connection and everyday experience. She teaches workshops that use music-making to inspire climate awareness and community action. A PhD candidate in music composition at UC Riverside, she is currently developing a feminist electro-pop album that examines themes of love, vulnerability, and visibility through storytelling.
Dream Sequence (In a Shopping Mall)
Still Picture Scoring from the Scavenging photograph collection
Had a dream in a forest.
Q: “But the photos are not showing a shopping mall?”
A: “No, they are not.”
Q: “Why a shopping mall then?”
A: “The shopping mall takes the form of a forest in my dream.”
Q: “But, why a shopping mall specifically?”
A: “Well, why is anything JOHN? You know, it’s like people these days —they ask STUPID questions after
STUPID questions. NOW! If you stop doing that, and look closely, you can see a person hiding in the
dark.”
JOHN: “In the photo?”
A: “No, in the corner of this room.”
Scavenging is my third photography book, a quiet reflection on three years of image-making. Divided into three chapters—2020, South Shore, and Crossing the Bridge—it traces a personal and collective memory shaped by isolation, youth, and change.
captures fragments from daily walks during lockdown, when the world slowed down to silence.South Shore refers to a small community in Yanjiao, where I lived alone during my final years of school. Surrounded by friends and neighbors, we cooked, drank, talked, and studied together—a brief, tender world recorded not by camera, but by phone: simple, direct, and sincere.
As The Sheltering Sky reminds us, certain afternoons become inseparable from who we are; these images hold that kind of memory.
Crossing the Bridge reflects the passage between Beijing and Yanjiao, a border charged with exams, restrictions, and fleeting hope.
Together, these photographs form an intimate diary of resilience and belonging amid uncertain times.
Artist: Jinmao Xiang 向锦茂
Born in 2001 and currently based in Beijing, they are studying Graphic Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Their work focuses on book design, photography, and image research. Exhibition history: 2023 "The Bridge of Arts," Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp; 2024 "Beyond Value—Uncommissioned Design Production," UCCA; 2024 "If You Lived Here," Beijing; 2024 "Foodscapes—From Field to Table," Taishun, Wenzhou; [Participation] 2024 "Jingmai Mountain: Sketching, Deep Description, and Imagination," Sinan Mansions, Shanghai.
Composer: Xiaowei Cao
Instagram: @emilyjonestvv
Xiaowei Cao (b. 1999) is a composer, currently getting his Ph.D. at the University of Florida. He works with texts and products of internet culture.
Fold 呼吸折叠
'Fold' is an installation dance video. A rotating installation with three rooms, representing three climate issues in a city, a girl who is troubled by climate issues protests in the city, and in this adventure, she also discovers that she is the cause of the climate problem.
The inspiration for "FOLD Breathing Folding" comes from Beijing, where I grew up. There are three unique climatic phenomena in Beijing: willow catkins, sandstorms and heavy rain. I have wondered what changes this ancient city will undergo when multiple unique climates occur simultaneously in Beijing? So I placed them on the same rotating device. These three rooms, which originated from the real climate issues in Beijing, together form the core of the film - a rotating, three-room integrated device. I regard it as a physical and folded microcosm of the urban climate, a recurring and inescapable micro-ecological cage. But isn't such a magical climate change also the result of various social problems colliding with each other? Therefore, I designed the walls of the rotating device as movable city walls. People in different living areas will subconsciously compete for more living space under the climate crisis. Climate threats of different seasons and forms form a continuous oppressive closed loop here.
Artist: Cong Le
Cong Le, a young director , was born in Beijing, China. I am currently studying at MA Performance:Screen, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. I like to pay attention to social issues such as women and children, and I am good at presenting a virtual world view with beautiful scenery in my works, placing existing social phenomena in the dystopian creative context, and arousing the audience's attention and thinking. The short films I directed were selected for dozens of international film festivals, and some of them triggered academic exchanges and interactions among universities during my undergraduate years. As a curator, I focus on experimental video creation and music creation. Cong Le is the curator and main coordinator of the Visual Symphony 2025.
Composer: Monstar Cao
Monstar Wanying Cao is a Los Angeles–based composer, concert pianist, and singer-songwriter currently pursuing her PhD in Digital Composition at the University of California, Riverside. Her two still-picture scores, Instruments of Curiosity and Sonic Postcard: Departures, are featured in the California Museum of Photography’s collection.
Monstar’s work spans instrumental, electronic, and multimedia composition, with international premieres including performances at Central Saint Martins (London), the Tuesday Night New Music series at the New England Conservatory, and SCI concerts at the Frost School of Music. She has also scored for dance and film, including Behind the Water, which premiered at the Zhejiang Experimental Art Theater in early 2024.
As a performer, Monstar has appeared as a concert pianist at the Encore Chamber Music Festival in Cleveland and singer in The World Choir Games. Her singer-songwriter debut song Simple Friend was released in 2021, with a new album forthcoming. She is also the founder and main producer of the Visual Symphony exhibition series.
Genie’s Bow
Genie’s Bow observes the life of a young Chinese child model growing up in London, navigating identity and ambition beneath the constant gaze of cameras and expectations. Through a quiet, observational lens, the film captures the tension between innocence and performance, revealing how visibility shapes a child’s understanding of self. Dora Zheng weaves intimacy and distance to explore a world that is at once tender and artificial — a goldfish bowl of light, desire, and reflection.
Artist: Dora Zheng
Currently pursuing an MA in Television at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. As an independent documentary director, her practice focuses on intimate, spontaneous storytelling rooted in everyday experience and emotional observation. Through a lens of quiet sensitivity, she explores the subtle intersections between personal narratives and broader social realities. Her works balance authenticity and artistry, reflecting a distinct visual language shaped by empathy and introspection. With over four years of filmmaking experience, Zheng has directed and edited multiple documentaries and short films, earning the Best Documentary Award at the London Independent Film Festival. Her recent works continue to examine identity, labor, and childhood through a poetic yet grounded documentary gaze.
Composer: Heron Zhao
Heron Zhao is a passionate composer, sound designer, and dulcimer player. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Dulcimer Performance from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where she excelled in traditional Chinese music, earning numerous accolades in major competitions in China.
While learning in Berklee College of music, she has contributed her skills as a composer and music editor to the student game projects.
In 2024, by working with visual artist Caien Huang, their collaboration work "The Story of #" was featured in the Visual Symphony exhibition at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
In 2025, working as an audio director and composer for indie game “Feather land” that is going to be released in February, 2026.
My Name Is...
This short is an exploration of the highs and lows of relearning a heritage language. For many second generation children of immigrants, heritage can be a difficult gulf to cross, but it can also hold much joy and connection in and of itself.
Artist: Sammi Tung
Sammi Tung is a student filmmaker who explores themes of disconnect, grief, language, joy, and friendship in film and media work. Sammi has worked in film and broadcast for seven years and has been involved in video production for over a decade since middle school, and has recently been involved in theatre work as well. She has broad interests across music and science and everything in between and additionally holds AAs in Humanities and Chinese Language.
Composer: Jaden D. Egan
My name is Jaden Egan and I'm a composer for film and multimedia studying composition at the University of Florida. I have worked in the film/tv industry for over a decade, starting out by modeling for big name brands such as Polo Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, and GAP. I've worked as both talent and crew on a variety of sets ranging from small print jobs to large-scale commercials. Film music has always fascinated me, but it wasn't until high school that I truly took the initiative by beginning learning the guitar. Through my guitar, I developed a unique compositional voice, influenced by romantic music, jazz, classical, and contemporary styles. To me film scoring has brought about the most emotionally intense and provocative art ever created, and I want to be among those who create it.
ROOM
Inspiration:My creative inspiration stems from a profound and universal yet often overlooked reality faced by women: "Many women, at various stages of their lives, may never truly have had a completely private and undisturbed physical space of their own. "
Logline: The woman danced in the elegant room to resist the discipline imposed by the space on her. When she was immersed in it, a group of unexpected guests burst in... What does it mean when the so-called "exclusive space" itself is merely a carefully crafted illusion?
Artist: Yuyan Zhang
Graduated from the Director major of Communication University of Zhejiang, currently pursuing a master's degree at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. The films have been selected multiple times for the Short Film Corner of the Cannes Film Festival, ARFF Berlin and other international awards. Focused on the narrative of female themes, the exploration and creation of experimental video language and dance video aesthetics.
Composer: Monstar Cao
Monstar Wanying Cao is a Los Angeles–based composer, concert pianist, and singer-songwriter currently pursuing her PhD in Digital Composition at the University of California, Riverside. Her two still-picture scores, Instruments of Curiosity and Sonic Postcard: Departures, are featured in the California Museum of Photography’s collection.
Monstar’s work spans instrumental, electronic, and multimedia composition, with international premieres including performances at Central Saint Martins (London), the Tuesday Night New Music series at the New England Conservatory, and SCI concerts at the Frost School of Music. She has also scored for dance and film, including Behind the Water, which premiered at the Zhejiang Experimental Art Theater in early 2024.
As a performer, Monstar has appeared as a concert pianist at the Encore Chamber Music Festival in Cleveland and singer in The World Choir Games. Her singer-songwriter debut song Simple Friend was released in 2021, with a new album forthcoming. She is also the founder and main producer of the Visual Symphony exhibition series.
Seaweed vr excerpt
This video excerpt is taken from Ziwei Tang’s original VR game created in 2025. In the full version, players enter a vast sci-fi world through VR headsets, freely exploring a 360° universe where sound and image unfold in continuous motion. The complete experience features music that evolves gradually with the player’s journey, deepening the sense of immersion and wonder.
For this video version, the composer Monstar Cao reimagined the sound world as a simulation—a glimpse into the atmosphere of the full interactive piece. Drawing from extended timbres and ever-shifting synth pads, the music aims to evoke a dreamlike landscape, where sonic textures drift between reality and imagination, inviting the listener into a quietly immersive space.
.jpg)
Artist: Ziwei Tang
Ziwei Tang is an artist based in London whose practice explores the intersections of ecology, spirituality, and posthuman thought. Drawing from anthropology and shamanic traditions, her work investigates the perceptual and ethical structures that shape the relationship between human and nonhuman beings. Through installation, sound, and ritual interventions, she seeks to evoke the agency of nature itself, questioning whether art can serve as a medium through which the nonhuman speaks.
Composer: Monstar Cao
Monstar Wanying Cao is a Los Angeles–based composer, concert pianist, and singer-songwriter currently pursuing her PhD in Digital Composition at the University of California, Riverside. Her two still-picture scores, Instruments of Curiosity and Sonic Postcard: Departures, are featured in the California Museum of Photography’s collection.
Monstar’s work spans instrumental, electronic, and multimedia composition, with international premieres including performances at Central Saint Martins (London), the Tuesday Night New Music series at the New England Conservatory, and SCI concerts at the Frost School of Music. She has also scored for dance and film, including Behind the Water, which premiered at the Zhejiang Experimental Art Theater in early 2024.
As a performer, Monstar has appeared as a concert pianist at the Encore Chamber Music Festival in Cleveland and singer in The World Choir Games. Her singer-songwriter debut song Simple Friend was released in 2021, with a new album forthcoming. She is also the founder and main producer of the Visual Symphony exhibition series.
Snapshots of life “人生照片”
Still Picture Scoring from the Scavenging photograph collection
My inspiration came from the warmth, the plants, and the autumn feeling that the photo conveyed. In my imagination, the window separates two contrasting worlds — the cold air outside and the cozy, safe, and gentle atmosphere inside. To capture that contrast, I chose warm guitar tones and vocals to express the main melody, and added lo-fi synth textures to evoke the grainy quality of film photography.
Scavenging is my third photography book, a quiet reflection on three years of image-making. Divided into three chapters—2020, South Shore, and Crossing the Bridge—it traces a personal and collective memory shaped by isolation, youth, and change.
captures fragments from daily walks during lockdown, when the world slowed down to silence.South Shore refers to a small community in Yanjiao, where I lived alone during my final years of school. Surrounded by friends and neighbors, we cooked, drank, talked, and studied together—a brief, tender world recorded not by camera, but by phone: simple, direct, and sincere.
As The Sheltering Sky reminds us, certain afternoons become inseparable from who we are; these images hold that kind of memory.
Crossing the Bridge reflects the passage between Beijing and Yanjiao, a border charged with exams, restrictions, and fleeting hope.
Together, these photographs form an intimate diary of resilience and belonging amid uncertain times.
Artist: Jinmao Xiang 向锦茂
Born in 2001 and currently based in Beijing, they are studying Graphic Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Their work focuses on book design, photography, and image research. Exhibition history: 2023 "The Bridge of Arts," Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp; 2024 "Beyond Value—Uncommissioned Design Production," UCCA; 2024 "If You Lived Here," Beijing; 2024 "Foodscapes—From Field to Table," Taishun, Wenzhou; [Participation] 2024 "Jingmai Mountain: Sketching, Deep Description, and Imagination," Sinan Mansions, Shanghai.
Composer: 开朗Kepler
A Chinese-born singer-songwriter hailing from Wuhan, China, and currently based in Los Angeles, earned her MA in Songwriting and Production from Berklee NYC. Despite growing up in a non-musical family, she embarked on her musical journey at the age of four with her first classical piano class, sparking a passion for composition discovered during her high school years. She possesses a strong penchant for narrative imagery, often capturing it through sketches and words. Imagination is the soil of her creativity, from which all her works take root and grow. She seeks to immerse herself in every form of art, to explore the hidden connections in between, and to let them flow through her life as water.
The Other Side (from Emily & Sue)
Music by Dana Kaufman
Libretto by Aiden K. Feltkamp, with text by Emily Dickinson and Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson
Emily & Sue is an a cappella pop opera/musical by Los Angeles-based composer Dana Kaufman and librettist Aiden K. Feltkamp. The piece—which was commissioned by Amherst College/The Emily Dickinson Museum—exists in album, live performance, and film formats. The film version of the opera was directed by Ron Bashford, created in collaboration with Four/Ten Media, and filmed in Dickinson’s actual room. Soprano Jasmine Muhammad and the Iris Vocal Trio star in the album and film.
The “popera” focuses on the little-known romantic relationship between Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Emily spent much of her life in seclusion and particularly in her room, where Emily & Sue takes place. Letters between Emily and Sue, as well as Emily’s poetry, document an intimate relationship that was not socially acceptable or legally recognized in 19th-century Massachusetts; the plot of Emily & Sue extrapolates from their correspondences.
When the opera opens, Emily sits in her room writing on the evening before her brother, Austin, and future sister-in-law Sue are to leave for their impending wedding. Suddenly, a letter from Sue slides into her room. Within it, Sue asks Emily to meet her at dawn so they can travel to the wedding together. Emily, torn between her desire to support Sue and her intense romantic love, spends the night contemplating her decision. Morning arrives and Emily despairs. Then (in this clip, “The Other Side”), there’s a knock at the door—it is Sue. The two have a conversation through the door. When Emily does not come out of her room, Sue leaves. At the end of the opera, Emily considers how her life will be from now on, and how hope can sustain her even though she cannot be with the love of her life.
It is up to the audience to decide whether Sue actually leaves Emily a letter and comes to her door, or if the events simply take place in Emily’s head.
Composer: Dana Kaufman
Website: www.danakaufmanmusic.com
Hailed as “whirlwind” (Gramophone), “ingeniously derived” (Sequenza21), and “dramatic…and powerfully funny” (Observer), the works of composer-librettist Dana Kaufman have been heard in North America, Europe, and Asia. Her music has been featured at venues/festivals such as Carnegie Hall, New York Opera Fest, Contemporary Music Center of Milan, the National Gugak Center (South Korea), Seattle Opera, The Tank, Jordan Hall, National Opera Week, Hartford Opera Theater, Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall (Croatia), and Ravinia Festival; it has been commissioned by the Kennedy Center/Washington National Opera, GRAMMY-winning pianist Nadia Shpachenko, the Louisville Ballet, Carlow Arts Festival (Ireland), Synchromy, Brightwork New Music, Paradox Opera, and many others.
A Fulbright Research Fellow in Estonia, National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, winner of an OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Women Composers: Discovery Grant (supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation), and five-time American Prize honoree, Kaufman has given lectures at the LA Opera, Women Composers Festival of Hartford, UCLA, Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, and the Music by Women Festival as a frequent speaker on gender diversity in composition and queer opera. Kaufman received her B.A. in Music and Russian (magna cum laude) from Amherst College and her M.M. in Composition from New England Conservatory. She earned her D.M.A. in Composition from University of Miami Frost School of Music, where she was the first Frost student to be a Dean’s Fellow and of which she is now a Centennial Medalist. She is Associate Professor in Music Composition at University of California, Riverside.
Work Phone Sleep
Work Phone Sleep is a performance artwork by Ziwei Tang, portraying the monotony and pressure of contemporary life. In the piece, the artist repeatedly writes the words “work,” “phone,” and “sleep” on a blank sheet of paper until it is completely filled—an act reflecting the endless routine many experience under modern social and economic pressures.
The accompanying sound composition by Monstar Cao amplifies this tension through a collage of over forty recorded voices, each reciting “work, phone, sleep” at different speeds and tones. Through multiple layers of cutting, looping, and random editing, these once-familiar words begin to fragment and mutate in the listener’s ear—sometimes forming entirely new syllables or phantom words. This sonic illusion blurs meaning and noise, mirroring the psychological distortion of repetition itself, and deepens the work’s critique of exhaustion, technology, and the collapse of individuality in a hyper-mechanized world.
Artist: Ziwei Tang
Ziwei Tang is an artist based in London whose practice explores the intersections of ecology, spirituality, and posthuman thought. Drawing from anthropology and shamanic traditions, her work investigates the perceptual and ethical structures that shape the relationship between human and nonhuman beings. Through installation, sound, and ritual interventions, she seeks to evoke the agency of nature itself, questioning whether art can serve as a medium through which the nonhuman speaks.
Composer: Monstar Cao
Monstar Wanying Cao is a Los Angeles–based composer, concert pianist, and singer-songwriter currently pursuing her PhD in Digital Composition at the University of California, Riverside. Her two still-picture scores, Instruments of Curiosity and Sonic Postcard: Departures, are featured in the California Museum of Photography’s collection.
Monstar’s work spans instrumental, electronic, and multimedia composition, with international premieres including performances at Central Saint Martins (London), the Tuesday Night New Music series at the New England Conservatory, and SCI concerts at the Frost School of Music. She has also scored for dance and film, including Behind the Water, which premiered at the Zhejiang Experimental Art Theater in early 2024.
As a performer, Monstar has appeared as a concert pianist at the Encore Chamber Music Festival in Cleveland and singer in The World Choir Games. Her singer-songwriter debut song Simple Friend was released in 2021, with a new album forthcoming. She is also the founder and main producer of the Visual Symphony exhibition series.