Mindy unwraps thin strips of Elastoplast and sticks them to the edge of the table gathering them into a fringe as we talk. The strips have small, black, claw-like turtle shell plectrums fastened at the ends. One by one she begins to wind these Elastoplast strips tightly around the last joint of each finger of her right hand, with a black claw protruding beyond the end of each fingertip. Guzheng hand.

This is a ritual she performs before each time she plays. She tells me that she enjoys these moments in which she prepares the body for the instrument and allows the mind to settle. She says that when she performs, and particularly when she improvises she reconnects with her deepest and most intense emotions and tries to express them through music. “It’s like your emotion has a shape now. It was invisible but then it becomes sound waves.”

Her solo opens with a sparse three-note figure that repeats and then is allowed to ring out.
There is so much subtlety and variation in the manner of striking each note. The fingers of her right hand – taped with the plectrums – impart a sharpness and brightness, while the un-taped left hand damps the strings to change the timbre and create shifts in pitch. As the piece progresses the fingers of the left hand also begin to pluck the strings, the flesh contact of her fingers lending the notes a contrasting roundness. We become aware that this piece is not so much a solo, but a duet between Mindy’s hands, perhaps expressing an innately human duality as the notes they play flow together then separate into polyphonous variations.

In a sense, this duality also mirrors Mindy’s life, which has existed on two planes since she began to travel from her home town of Lanzhou in north western China. She is a seeker and a restless spirit who left for London ten years ago to open up new possibilities in her music and in her life in general, but who returns home regularly. Her musical drive exists to create a personal language that brings together her experiences growing up in China and training in Chinese music, with the incredibly diverse range of musical settings she has been involved in living in the west: “The more places I live and the more music I learn the broader my range has become. I used to just play traditional Chinese music but being in the UK and Australia has opened my eyes. I now feel like the guzheng should not be limited by a genre.”

As her solo begins to develop it grows in intensity. The right hand migrates to the extreme edge of the instrument developing a high, delicate, pointillist texture, while the left hand sweeps dramatically across the full range of the instrument involving the whole body in a gesture that perfectly mirrors physical movement with the sound we hear.

Mindy’s hands have become little creatures she is watching as we are watching. They dance around one another then dance together and the body of her instrument thrums with the energy produced. Overtones gather and oscillate as high clusters of notes are dropped like bright coins into a fountain drifting then settling with a glint of silver.

Solo Series #10
Performance: Mindy Meng Wang
Photo: Sarah Walker
Audio and Video producer: Leo Dale
Text: Peter Knight