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Talk show brings arts into the living room
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FOR pianist Feng Ying, arts are a way of helping people better understand life. Playing the piano, she said, isn’t just about mastering the techniques, but about exposing oneself and one’s audiences to the great minds who composed the music.
Feng’s mother was the first driving force behind her career and made her practice since she was a little girl.
But, as she grew older, she developed her own curiosity, and expanded her interests. She was selected as seeded ping pong player in primary school, sang Peking Opera songs, read all 10 volumes of the “Jean Christophe” novels before she was 18 years old and she developed a love for museum visits.
By her 30s, the young pianist had made a great number of friends in different art fields and frequently met them to exchange views at private gatherings.
“It is interesting that you can always find connections among different art works even though they were presented by different artists in different art forms,” Feng said. Through her own talk show program “Innovative Arts+” broadcast weekly on TV189.COM, the pianist recently started sharing her experience and points of view with a larger group of people.
The talk show feels like a casual meeting where Feng and her friends advocate classic arts in an easily accessible way. Masters in Western and Chinese music, literature, architecture, and even game designers are invited to discuss different themes.
Feng, who graduated from Conservatoires Nationaux Supérieurs de Paris, believes that her foundation in China and her studies with masters have turned her into the artists she is today.
“The masters can often broaden your mind and view based on their rich experience in arts, which may take you great effort to gain all by yourself,” Feng said. Though an increasing number of master classes are available in the city each year, they are still limited to a small number of people. She hopes her talk show can help fill in the gap — at least to a certain extent.
“All the guests I invited so far are masters in their field. I hope the talk show can become a platform where different arts can communicate and clash,” Feng said. According to her plan, though the first few talk shows may focus on some traditional topics like literature, Western classics and composers, the following shows will leave more room for cross-over creations.
“It will not just be the common cross-over creations between classic and pop music, but involve artists of more fields in one theme, such as letting musicians, ink-and-wash painters, and game designers improvise one particular theme,” Feng said. “It will be fun, and I hope this will help attract more ordinary people to the arts.”
Feng and her guests will stage about 25 concerts at Ke Center for Contemporary Arts within the next year, with tickets starting at 200 yuan (US$30).
Though most of the guests at the talk show are friends of Feng, she keeps getting surprised by some of their opinions, like the one of 78-year-old guqin (a traditional Chinese instrument) master Gong Yi, who said that the guqin was one of the easiest instruments to learn how to play.
“But then he elaborated his view that playing the guqin is technically easy, but it requires much more for one to interpret the artistic conception in guqin pieces as they are often closely connected with history, literature and traditional Chinese philosophy, which I cannot agree with more,” Feng said. “None of the great arts are isolated. Often, the creator or interpreter is required to have a rich, comprehensive understanding of arts to make his/her own work great.”
Feng’s talk show is gaining popularity, but she is concerned about the future of classic arts. Young people, she said, are more interested in K-pop.
“I think it is still a problem of insufficient exposure to serious art. It has to be around the public to get their interests, just like the Korean stars are on advertisement posters on almost every street,” Feng said. “I am trying my best to make that happen, and I hope there will be more passionate artists who do their part.”
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