Music
Isaac DROSCHA, Senior Lecturer (HUMA)
Isaac Droscha, vocalist, actor, and conductor, holds a Doctorate in Vocal Performance from the University of Michigan.
He has conducted choirs, opera, and musical theater performances in Hong Kong and the US. He studied conducting at the University of Michigan and at Hope College and has conducted in theatres and churches in Hong Kong and the United States. He is the Music Director of Opera Box and the HKUST Community Musical.
As a singer, he has performed a number of roles with various companies, including the Des Moines Metro Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre, Opera New Jersey, and Arbor Opera Theater. His performances have received numerous positive reviews, and some of his notable appearances include roles in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Le Nozze di Figaro, The Rake’s Progress, Madama Butterfly, L’Elisir d’Amore, Die Zauberflöte, Die Fledermaus, Falstaff, and Airadne auf Naxos. His performances have received numerous positive reviews, such as: “Isaac Droscha is ingenious in his portraying of Falstaff;” and “Isaac Droscha, in the same role, was blessed with an extremely robust and agile voice, and behaved onstage like a true commedia dell’arte clown, throwing in countless little comic asides that landed perfectly every time;” and “Isaac Droscha, who combined his lovely voice with a very well-acted menacing presence. Droscha really hit his stride when revealing his character's true identity near the end of the opera in a riveting performance.” He was also recently featured in two films produced in collaboration with RTHK based on the operas La Serva Padrona and Rita. He is a close partner of Tutti, Musica Viva HK, and Opera Lab.
As an actor, he has performed in numerous plays and improv performances, with a special affinity for Shakespeare. He frequently coaches theatrical voice and pedagogies of acting.
He is a prolific concert performer of oratorio and art song and frequently lends his vocal talents to radio and television at RTHK.
Gan GUO, Adjunct Professor and Performer-in-Residence (HUMA)
Gan GUO is an erhu master based in Paris, France. In 2016, he was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the Ministry of Culture of the government of France. He has resided in France since 2000. He originally studied erhu and percussion at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music. He has recorded more than 90 albums and performed on more than 70 film scores, including Kung Fu Panda 3, Shaolin, and L'Idole. He has performed in major international venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Chicago Symphony Center, Paris Palais des Congress, and the Tokyo Suntory Concert Hall. He has performed with well-known musicians including Lang Lang, Yvan Cassar, Didier Lockwood, Gabrel Yared, Hans Zimmer, Jean Francois Zygel and Nguyen Le. Orchestra he has performed with include the Paris Opera Symphony Orchestra, Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Polish Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Symphony Orchestra.
In addition to performing traditional erhu music, Master Guo has played jazz and other contemporary music. Mark Swed, a music critic for The Los Angles Times, remarked on Guo Gan's performance with Lang Lang: “Guo was a wonder, his Erhu sweetly filling the air with an astonishing sweet and sumptuous sonic perfume, which Lang accompanied with exquisite sensitivity.” Steve Smith, editor of The New York TimesArts Page wrote, “Mr. Guo, a magnificent performer, shaped melodies with the expressive contours of vocal lines in Hua Yanjun's ‘Moon Reflected on the Er-Quan Spring’ and provided flourishes that might give a violinist pause during Huang Gai Huai's ‘Horse Racing.’ ”
Ilari KAILA, Senior Lecturer and Composer-in-Residence (HUMA)
Ilari Kaila is a Finnish-born composer and pianist. He joins the music faculty of HKUST from New York, where he has worked at Columbia University and Stony Brook University (State University of New York), teaching harmony, counterpoint, musicianship, and post-tonal music analysis, and as a teaching artist in composition with the New York Philharmonic. His work has been presented by the MATA Festival in New York City, including its inaugural composer portrait concert; as the Composer-in-Residence of the Chelsea Music Festival in New York City and Taipei; at the American Music Festival in Albany; Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong; Metropolis Festival in Australia; Banff Centre Summer Arts Festival in Canada; the New York International Fringe Festival; and the Helsinki Festival. Artists and ensembles Kaila has worked with include the Tanglewood New Fromm Players, The Knights, Escher String Quartet, Aizuri Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Uusinta Ensemble, Olli Mustonen, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Avanti Chamber Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Albany Symphony Orchestra, and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra’s chamber ensembles. An album of Kaila’s chamber music was released on the Innova Recordings label in March 2020.
He is the recipient of numerous commission grants, awards, and scholarships, including prizes from the Intimacy of Creativity World Premiere Concert Audience Vote, the 9th Espoo International Piano Festival, Sibelius Fund Commission Grant, ASO/Mellon Foundation ‘Composer to Center Stage’ Competition, and American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship. Artist residencies he has worked at include Escape to Create (Seaside, Florida), Cité des Arts (Paris), and Villa Lante (Rome).
Kaila’s music has been described with words such as “haunting”, “intriguing”, “engaging ... soulful” (The New York Times), “nearly unbearable beauty... A modern masterpiece” (The WholeNote), “melodically euphoric” (Rondo Classic), “I kept coming back to it... the music is so beautiful, and I want to experience it again and again” (Orchestergraben—5 Best New Music Albums of 2020), “powerfully resonating” (Helsingin Sanomat), “haunting” (The New Yorker), “wonderfully played wonderful music” (YLE Finland Album of the Year 2020 shortlist), and “shrouded in mystery... haunting... dreamlike” (South China Morning Post).
Galison LAU, Instructional Assistant (HUMA)
Galison Lau is one of the most active composers of his generation in Hong Kong. He studied with Wing-fai Law, Clarence Mak, and Samuel Lo at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, as well as with Leonardo Balada and Fabien Lévy at the Carnegie Mellon University.
Mr. Lau’s music has been performed by renowned ensembles, including the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Parker String Quartet, MIVOS Quartet, RTHK Quartet, Varshavsky Shapira Piano Duo, and the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. His compositions have been performed at and broadcast from various events, including the New Music From Hong Kong Concert in New York City, the first concert in US for the 20th Anniversary of Hong Kong; Intimacy of Creativity 2017 Contemporary Song Festival; ACL 2013 Singapore; ISCM–ACL World New Music Days 2007; as one of the pieces selected from Hong Kong at the 2006 International Rostrum of Composers in Paris; the Lilian Baylis Theatre in Sadlers Wells, London; Hong Kong’s Musicarama 2005, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017 and New Generation 2005, 2006.
Mr. Lau has received several commissions, including from the Helsyd Piano Trio and the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble in 2017; Hong Kong Arts Festival 2014; Spotlight On Young Musicians Concert Series in 2011; Musicarama 2010, 2012, and 2017 from the Hong Kong Composers’ Guild with sponsorship from the CASH Music Fund. In 2009, Scents for string quartet was awarded first prize by the Harry Archer Memorial Scholarship. He has also composed a piece for the inauguration of the Wellcome Theatre of the HKAPA in 2006.
Timothy PAGE, Assistant Professor (AMC)
Multifaceted, Chicago-born composer Timothy Page creates works that revolve around play with style and context, body, physical materials, and space, exploring media from instrumental and electroacoustic music to sound-based performance art.
His compositions have been performed around the globe by leading ensembles such as the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente (US), Third Coast Percussion (US), Eighth Blackbird (US), Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (FI), Avanti! (FI), Uusinta (FI), Defunensemble (FI), S.E.M. Ensemble (US/CZ), Caput (IS), and Cikada (NO). His music has been recorded by artists such as Defunensemble, Uusinta, Ensemble Dal Niente, Patrick Yim, and Olli-Pekka Tuomisalo.
Page was a 2023 recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition.
He holds degrees from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland, where he established himself as a composer and studied with Veli-Matti Puumala; and the University of Chicago, where he completed his PhD with mentors Augusta Read Thomas and Anthony Cheung. Page first joined HKUST as Lecturer in Music and Digital Arts at the Division of Humanities, and in 2025 was appointed Assistant Professor in the University’s new Division of Art and Machine Creativity (AMC).
Page is a founder and co-director of Dayjob Collective, a Helsinki-based interdisciplinary ensemble investigating meeting points between contemporary music and performance art. In addition to the Guggenheim Foundation, his work has been supported by the Finnish Sibelius Foundation, Madetoja Foundation, Kone Foundation, Finnish Arts Council, and Finnish Cultural Foundation. He was a winner of the Society of Electroacoustic Music/ASCAP award as well as the Finnish Pro-Musica Award.
Mandy PETTY, Teaching Associate (HUMA)
Mandy Petty received her training in at Laine Theatre Arts in Epsom, England, one of the leading musical theatre schools in the UK. She has worked with the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) since its founding in 1984, from 1995 to 2014 as a full-time staff, teaching Musical Theatre (Jazz & Tap) to the Dance and Drama students. Throughout those years, she choreographed many dance concerts and musicals at HKAPA as well as in commercial productions outside of the academy. Her credits include Bye Bye Birdie, 42nd Street, South Pacific, Fiddler on the Roof, Guys and Dolls, Annie Get Your Gun, My Fair Lady, Little Shop of Horrors, The Full Monty, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, to name a few. Mandy has also worked in the commercial sector, choreographing and performing with local celebrities such as Liza Wang. As a qualified teacher and examiner for Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, UK, she regularly examines, adjudicates, and conducts workshops both within Hong Kong and overseas.
Bright SHENG, Helmut and Anna Pao Sohmen Professor-at-Large (IAS)
In addition to his appointment at HKUST, the MacArthur Fellow Bright Sheng is the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. His music ranges from dramatic to lyrical and is strongly influenced by the folk and classical traditions of eastern and central Asia. Since 2000, he has been studying and researching the music phenomenon of the Silk Road culture. And he also has served as the Artistic Advisor to Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project Inc.
Sheng has collaborated with distinguished musicians such as Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Masur, Christoph Eschenbach, Charles Dutoit, Jaap Van Zweden, Leonard Slatkin, Gerard Schwarz, David Robertson, David Zinman, Neeme Järvi, Robert Spano, Hugh Wolff, Yo Yo Ma, Peter Serkin, Emanuel Ax, Gil Shaham, Chao-Liang Lin, and Yefim Bronfman, Evelyn Glennie, among others. He has been widely commissioned and performed by virtually all important musical institutions in North America, Europe, and Asia, including the White House, the 2008 Beijing International Olympic Games, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestra de Paris, BBC Symphony, Hamburg Radio Symphony, Danish National Symphony, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Santa Fe Opera, and New York City Opera.
As a conductor and pianist, he has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Kennedy Center, performed with, in the U.S., the San Francisco Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Seattle Symphony, New York Chamber Symphony, and Grand Rapids Symphony, as well as the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in Russia, Dortmund Philharmonic in Germany, and the China National Symphony, among others.
Exclusively published by G. Schirmer Inc. in New York City, his music can be heard on the Naxos, Sony Classical, Talarc, Delos, Koch International, and New World record labels, as well as on Grammofon AB BIS.
Amy SZE, Lecturer (HUMA)
Dr. Amy Sze holds the Performer’s Certificate, Doctor and Master of Musical Arts in Piano Performance and Literature, from the Eastman School of Music. Her principal teachers include Nelita True and Gabriel Kwok. She started her musical training at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts at the age of ten. She is the recipient of numerous scholarships, including the Avis D. Vaughn Scholarship, the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Scholarship, and the Hong Kong Jockey Club Music and Dance Fund Overseas Scholarship.
Amy has appeared as a soloist with orchestras such as the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and the Eastman Symphony Orchestra. She has also performed in major festivals including the Aspen Music Festival, the Cliburn Piano Institute, the Harbin Summer Music Festival, and the Salzburg Mozarteum Academy. In the summer of 2017, she had the privilege of performing in the Beethoven Piano Sonatas Marathon in Vienna—two concerts lasting 12 hours—along with celebrated pianists from around the world.
She has been a member of the Eastman Chamber Music Society, which engages in outreach projects and charity concerts in public schools and community centres. An active performer of contemporary music, she has been a featured artist at the Intimacy of Creativity 2017 Contemporary Song Festival, the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival, Le French May Festival, and with Hong Kong New Generation. She has collaborated with such distinguished artists as Derek Bermel, David Childs, Peter Cooper, Benedict Cruft, Yoshiyuki Ishikawa, Raphael Severe, and John Williams.
Amy is currently on the faculty of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong Baptist University. Apart from lectures and masterclasses, she frequently serves on the juries for various awards and competitions.
Alvin TAM, Instructional Assistant (HUMA)
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Alvin Lok-Hei Tam is currently a Doctor of Music Candidate (Composition) at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University. He holds a B.A. in Music from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and later earned an M.Mus in Music Theory and Composition from New York University. As an accomplished composer, Tam’s musical output encompasses a diverse array of genres, including contemporary classical, electro-acoustic, multimedia scoring, and religious music. He has garnered numerous accolades and commissions, allowing him to collaborate with many renowned ensembles and organizations, including the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Manhattan Symphonie, the American Guild of Organists, The Hong Kong Children's Choir, JACK Quartet, Cassatt Quartet, Chamber Music America, and Musica del Cuore. His works and commissions have been showcased globally, with performances in vibrant cities such as Guangzhou, Valencia, Dresden, Cologne, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and New York City.
Roderick YU, Instructional Assistant (HUMA)
Roderick Yu is a pianist who takes up different roles in orchestral, opera, and chamber music, as well as vocal piano accompanying. Roderick completed his Master’s Degree with Distinction with the support of Leverhulme Trust at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Bachelor’s Degree at the Hong Kong Baptist University. He has studied under Caroline Palmer, Graham Johnson, Gordon Back, Pamela Lidiard, and Norman Lee. He has received the Scotiabank scholarship to be the Art of Song Fellow during the 2013 Toronto Summer Music Festival, where he received intensive coaching from Elly Ameling, Julius Drake and Michael McMahon. Roderick was trained as a Lieder coach by Konrad Jarnot and Christoph Bernerduring the 2014 Internationale Sommerakademie in Universität Mozarteum Salzburg.
He has been invited to perform with the Collegium Musicum Hong Kong, Guildhall New Music Ensemble, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, and the HKBDA Wind Orchestra. He has also performed at international music festivals in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada, Austria and Hong Kong. His past performances include Cecilia Heejeong Kim’s My Arirang, How Much I am Missing You (2013), Joyce Tang’s Reflections on Arirang (2013), Nigel Clarke’s The Flavour of Tears (2013), Luis Serrano Alarcón’s Three Sketches (2014), and Brett Dean’s Wolf-Lieder (2006), broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in London.
Creative Writing
Zaifu LIU, Tin Ka Ping Outstanding Scholar-in-Residence of Chinese Literature (HUMA)
Liu Zaifu is a renowned writer, critic, scholar, and public intellectual who rose to prominence in China during the early 1980s. He has held numerous high level academic appointments including director of the Institute of Literature in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, editor-in-chief of Literary Review, visiting professor at the University of Chicago, the University of Stockholm, the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is currently a Senior Visiting Fellow at HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Professor in the Division of Humanities.
A prolific writer, he has published more than 100 books, some are academic and others are books of his literary essays. His representative Chinese language publications include Lu Xun and Natural Science (1976), A Biography of Lu Xun (1981), Lu Xun’s Aesthetic Thought (1981), The Theory of Character Organization (1986), Reflections on Literature (1986), Twenty-Five Kinds of Men (1992), Farewell to Gods (1994), On Gao Xingjian (2000), Four Books on the Dream of the Red Chamber (2006), Brief Theory of Li Zehou’s Aesthetics (2009), On Jia Baoyu (2014), and a ten-volume series entitled Records of Exile (1993-2010). His English publications include: Reflections on the Dream of the Red Chamber (2008), A Study of Two Classics (2012).
Jianmei LIU, Professor (HUMA)
Professor Liu Jianmei is specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese literature and gender studies. She received her BA from Beijing University and her MA (East Asian Languages and Literatures) from University of Colorado at Boulder and PhD (East Asian Studies) from Columbia University. Before joining the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, she was Associate Professor of Chinese literature at University of Maryland.
Lianke YAN, IAS Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture
Yan Lianke was born in a small village of Song County, Henan province in 1958. He joined the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1978, graduated from Henan University majoring in Political Education in 1985, and received a degree from the Literature Department of the PLA Academy of Art in 1991. He began his writing career in 1979, and his novels include The Passing of Time, As Hard as Water, Lenin’s Kisses, Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, Odes and Hymns, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles and The Day the Sun Died. As one of contemporary China’s most controversial and influential authors, he has received more than twenty distinguished national and international literature prizes, including the First and Second Lu Xun Literature Prize, the Third Lao She Literature Prize, and the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Award. He was a finalist for the Prince of Asturias Literature Prize and the Prix Femina Literature Prize. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for Lenin’s Kisses in 2013, and was shortlisted again for Four Books in 2016, longlisted for The Explosion Chronicles in 2017. In 2014 he was awarded with the Franz Kafka Literature Prize, and in 2016 his novel The Day the Sun Died won the Dream of the Red Chamber Literary Prize from Hong Kong. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages, including Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, French, English, German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Spanish, and Serbian. Many of these translations have attracted attention and critical acclaim for the novels in their respective literary markets. He is currently a professor at Renmin University in Beijing, and Sin Wai Kin Visiting Professor of Chinese Culture at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Shengqing WU, Professor (HUMA)
Professor Wu’s research concerns the literary and intellectual history of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century China, particularly classical poetry written in a modern context. An examination of the works and activities of previously neglected poets who maintained their commitment to traditional aesthetic ideals, her first book Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition 1900-1937 (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2013), illuminates the splendor of Chinese lyricism and highlights the mutually transformative power of the modern and the archaic. Complementing her passion for poetry (from the classical to the contemporary), her scholarly interests also include the relationship between image and text, questions of gender, and the issue of emotion. She is working on her second book project, which is tentatively titled “Emotion in Transit: Text and Image in Modern China.” Prior to joining the faculty of HKUST, Wu was an associate professor at Wesleyan University, where she taught for eight years. She was the receipt of an An Wang postdoctoral fellowship from the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, a Junior Scholar Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.