Shiuan Chang Shiuan Chang

Shiuan Chang, born in 1989, is a full-time “bean-sprout farmer” (bean sprouts being a Chinese nickname for musical notes)—though the crop is inedible, and may not even serve as food for the spirit. Chang’s first memory after birth is of pushing a baby walker, one step, one sound; Chang’s second birth came while copying out the Heart Sutra. Through sound in motion, Chang seeks to let go of the distinction between future and past.

Described by the French music magazine Classic Agenda as a US-based composer “full of spirituality,” Chang has received awards from the American Composers Forum (ACF), the Asian Cultural Council (ACC), the Djerassi Foundation and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Born in Taipei in 1989, Chang has had works performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, Symphony Center in Chicago, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Moscow Philharmonia, Royaumont in France, the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie, the Archipel Festival in Geneva, the Weimar international arts festival and the National Concert Hall. Recent collaborators and commissioners include the Tonkünstler Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Taiwan’s National Symphony Orchestra, the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, The Orchestra Now, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the Princeton chamber choir, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, the TANA Quartet, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Ensemble Multilaterale and Les Métaboles. In 2020 Chang created the sound and vocal music for Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s “Stilled Light” (定光), leading the performers to find the resonance of sound through their bodies; in 2021 Chang composed for TIFA’s “A Thousand-Year Stage, Yet I Have Hardly Lived” (千年舞台，我卻沒怎麼活過) and TIFA’s “My Village Trilogy” (我庒三部曲). In 2022 Chang composed “A Bond So Deep, a Love So Shallow” (緣那麼深，愛那麼淺), an 80-minute contemporary cantata adapted from Lung Ying-tai’s first novel, “Beneath Dawu Mountain” (大武山下).

In 2016 Chang founded Innuan (音元), active in New York, curating performances that bring together space, art, music and technology at venues including Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, Cornell University’s Johnson Museum of Art, the gallery of Pratt Institute in New York, the Center for Italian Modern Art, Fotografiska and Broadway in New York.

Beyond art and concert music, Chang is actively involved in charitable work: in 2015 Chang scored the 20th-anniversary film of the Children Are Us Foundation and co-presented a charity concert for the Genesis Social Welfare Foundation at the Eslite Performance Hall in Songyan. In early 2024, commissioned by Dunren Psychiatric Hospital, Chang released a debut album, “Settled Earth” (安土).