Bringing together the gentle, elegant QingQing Sing and the heavy, sorrowful The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, the way that WANG Xin-xin performs might appear traditional, but it transcends the tradition greatly. Departing from the norm of Nanguan ensemble, Wang creates a solo performance with just a single pipa (Chinese lute) that somehow expresses the full extent of Nanguan music—a one-person music band, a one-person theater troupe, and a one-person choir. As a music genre of instrumental music and singing, Wang transforms Nanguan and infuses it with a dramatic momentum that a grand theater might not even be able to produce. By integrating performance and narrative, the objective and detached narrative is instantaneously switched to a theatrical work of subjective intervention, demonstrating the outstanding arrangement of this piece. QingQing Sing, as an indulgent overture in an ethereal style, is followed by a tragedy in the second half of the performance. In between momentum and tranquility, a tragic twist signaling the earth-shaking war drums from Yuyang is gradually paved and revealed, before a dramatic tension finally bursts with an impressive force.(Commentator/WANG Pao-Hsiang)

With Tang-dynasty poet Bai Juyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow as the script, LIN Hwai-Min looks to expand Wang’s performance capacity by encouraging her to not just be confined to nanguan. That is, for her performance, almost all of the instruments traditionally seen in nanguan music are noticeably absent. Instead, with one pipa in her hands, Wang presents this strikingly suspenseful love story between an emperor and his beloved consort. The pipa alternates among sounds of bleak whimpering, explosive convulsions, and the gentle descent of Chinese parasol tree leaves falling in the late evening. The spoken, chanted, and sung vocals, accompanied by a variety of methods of string plucking, sketch out the psychological distance between the history, the writer, and the audience. According to Lin, “Wang’s chanting, speaking, singing, and playing in this performance create an awe-inspiring, thought-provoking palace of eternal life for the listeners.”

To amplify the scale of innovation of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, the first half of the performance is a traditional nanguan piece, Qing Qing Sing, which aims for the audience to experience the rising and falling drawn-out vocals and the reserved, gentle, composed qualities conventional to the genre. The second half is the newly interpreted The Song of Everlasting Sorrow. The creative contrast between the two exemplifies perfectly Wang’s capacity to break free from long-established norm.

Xin Xin Nanguan Ensemble was founded by WANG Xin-Xin in 2003. It is dedicated to interdisciplinary innovation of nanguan and its collaboration with contemporary art. In 2015, Wang and LU Chien-Ying proposed together a new perspective of “contemporary nanguan,” which advocates the creative transmission of qupai (fixed melodies in classical Chinese music) in place of longstanding convention, and the application of music for the benefit of society by using it for people’s physical and mental well-being. In 2017, she launched the “Contemporary Nanguan Earth Project”; and in 2018, she started the “Listen Workshop,” aimed at transforming the application and promotion of nanguan through the five senses so as to infuse a consciousness of the new era into the music in the aspects of interpretation, creation, and promotion.