Chao Tian

About the Artist

CHAO TIAN is a boundary-breaking Chinese dulcimer virtuoso, improviser, and sonic thinker whose music unfolds across tradition, experimentation, and diasporic imagination. Trained in the classical lineage of the Chinese dulcimer since the age of five, she now bends that legacy into new shapes—treating the instrument not as a symbol, but as a living, questioning voice.  Her creative work draws from intercultural collaboration and critical listening, engaging with sound as both form and encounter. She is the founder of Unheard Sounds, an ongoing initiative that explores how immigrant artists reshape artistic language through tension, resonance, and reinvention. Her signature project, From China to Appalachia, created with two-time GRAMMY winners Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, reimagines the meeting point between Chinese and American folk traditions through dialogue and shared musical roots. She also leads the cross-genre ensemble Always Folk and co-creates Dong Xi (East–West) with world percussionist Tom Teasley. ​A former member of China’s renowned 12 Girls Band, Chao has performed across more than 30 countries. Her U.S. journey began as the first Chinese artist-in-residence at Strathmore Music Center (2017–2018), where she initiated bold collaborations across genres. She has since been a fellow at Art Omi, a NextLOOK artist at the University of Maryland, a Musician Changemaker Accelerator fellow (2024), and a GRAMMY U mentor (2025). Her studies with Karen Ashbrook in American hammered dulcimer, supported by the Maryland State Arts Council’s Folklife Apprenticeship, further expand her bicultural instrumental fluency. ​Beyond performance, Chao is a scholar-practitioner whose work bridges artistic intuition and academic inquiry. She holds BA and MA degrees from the China Conservatory of Music and previously served as Director of the Arts Education Center at Beijing Language and Culture University. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at Boston University. ​Her research engages sound as both method and metaphor—a way of decoding belonging, voicing displacement, and composing new cultural grammars. It spans the expressive tension between structure and spontaneity, the linguistic textures of music shaped by migration, and the sensory entanglements of memory and movement. Through lecture-performances, writing, and public scholarship, she examines how diasporic artists reimagine inherited traditions in unfamiliar contexts—where regional musics converge, hybrid identities resonate, and the unsaid finds form through vibration. ​To Chao, the dulcimer is not merely a vessel of tradition—it is a thinking body, a site where sound, identity, and memory are continuously refigured. Through structured improvisation, instrumental reconfiguration, and embodied experimentation, she treats sound as a mode of inquiry—an act of listening that resists fixed interpretation. Her artistic language unsettles inherited meanings and opens the Chinese dulcimer to new roles: as a migratory voice, a critical instrument, and a medium for reimagining how we dwell in sound.

Artist's Statement

I approach music as both inheritance and invention. Trained in the classical tradition of the Chinese dulcimer from an early age, I now treat the instrument not as a fixed emblem of “Chineseness” but as a questioning body—capable of speaking across cultures, negotiating identity, and unsettling what sound is expected to mean. My practice unfolds through structured improvisation, prepared techniques, and intercultural dialogue, where sound becomes both material and method: a way of decoding belonging, voicing displacement, and composing new cultural grammars. Collaboration is central to my work. Through projects such as Unheard Sounds and From China to Appalachia—with GRAMMY winners Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer—I investigate how musical traditions in tension can open into resonance and reinvention. Whether reimagining Chinese and American folk roots, creating spontaneous soundscapes in Dong Xi, or directing the cross-genre ensemble Always Folk, I seek to generate spaces where hybrid identities emerge and boundaries blur. Performance for me is inseparable from research. As a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology, I use lecture-performances, writing, and critical listening to examine how diasporic artists transform inherited traditions within unfamiliar contexts. This dual path—as performer and scholar—lets me navigate sound as both embodied knowledge and critical inquiry. To me, the dulcimer is not merely a vessel of memory; it is a migratory voice and a medium for reimagining how we dwell in sound. Through vibration and silence, it continually asks how music can shape, rather than simply reflect, our shared experience.