New Model Asians – by Ken Ueno for Matt Lau
Concert: New Model Asians
Date: 7:30pm Sat 12 Dec
Venue: M1060 Multimedia Theatre
Guest Lecture: Behind New Model Asians
Date: 3-4:30pm Thu 10 Dec
Venue: M1052 Screening Theatre
*Registration Link: here
New Model Asians – by Ken Ueno for Matt Lau
For percussion and electronics
New Model Asians (2026) is a multi-movements concert-length percussion solo with electronics, written for Matthew Lau by Ken Ueno Together. These movements trace a trajectory from virtuosity through transition to song, situating sonic difference as a site of both critique and possibility. It unfolds as a sequence of contrasting movements, each inhabiting a distinct sonic, cultural, and bodily register. This diversity is not incidental—it mirrors the condition of code-switching that structures the immigrant experience. To move between Dim Sum, Wong Sik (in English and Cantonese), rap, vibraphone meditations, and mediated sound worlds is to inhabit multiple logics at once, shifting tone, language, and gesture depending on context. These transitions are not seamless; they carry friction, adaptation, and memory.
Code-switching here is not only linguistic but embodied. It reflects the necessity of learning new tastes, new etiquettes, even new postures—of softening accents, recalibrating desires, and reshaping one’s presence to fit unfamiliar spaces. The work traces these negotiations: from the intimacy of culturally specific references to the abstraction of sound, from historical reflection (as in the Manzanar movement) to the immediacy of voice and rhythm. What emerges is not a unified narrative, but a constellation of shifts—each one marking the labor, resilience, and creativity of living between worlds.
It is also a personal creole, as a metaphor. A creole that is not a deficiency, but a space of claiming an authentic voice of the future. An Asian American voice that does not give you nihao and konnichiwa as the dominant culture might expect, but instead emerges from lived entanglements—linguistic, cultural, and embodied.
In this sense, I am thinking with Édouard Glissant, particularly his notion of opacity: the right not to be fully understood, translated, or made transparent within the frameworks of dominant knowledge. Creole, here, is not a hybrid that resolves difference into clarity, but one that sustains difference as a generative condition. It resists flattening.
This resonates with the idea of Wong Sik (黃色 / 黃食, depending on usage) in Cantonese—an idiomatic, culturally embedded expression that carries layers of meaning not readily accessible outside its context. It can function as a reserved space: one that does not seek legibility for an external listener, but instead affirms an internal coherence, a shared understanding that does not need to be explained. In this way, opacity is not exclusion, but protection—a way of holding complexity without reducing it.
The music, then, moves through this creolized space which allows friction, slippage, and resonance. Sounds do not translate cleanly; they carry traces of elsewhere, of histories that remain partially obscured. What emerges is not a stable identity, but a field of relation—one that insists on being heard without being fully decoded.
Matthew Lau
Hailed by the Aspen Times for his “soulful and technically impressive solo” at his vibraphone concerto debut at the Aspen Music Festival, percussionist Dr. Matthew Lau performs a wide range of repertoire with an absolute commitment to communicate the meaning and essence of percussion music to its audience. As a queer Asian percussionist, Dr. Lau challenges the conventional narratives, subverts societal definitions, and works to change the traditional prescribed career path, with high- calibre impactful performances with a whimsical twist.
Matthew is the co-founder and artistic director of Hong Kong contemporary percussion group The Up:Strike Project, and is part of the duo Fisher/Lau Project. Matthew enjoys an international teaching & performing career, 2019–2025 engagements include appearance in universities, festival and competitions in countries like USA, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, the UK, Italy, Canada, Portugal, Taiwan, Spain, Australia, and Russia.
Matthew obtained his DMA in percussion performance from Stony Brook University under Eduardo Leandro. He was awarded the coveted LAB Grant from the Boston Foundation in 2022. He also receives additional projects & touring grants from Mass Cultural Council, Passim Foundation, City of Boston Mayor’s Office, and Hong Kong Arts Development Council. He received the Award for New Artist at the 2018 Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. He is currently on the Board of Advisor for The Percussive Arts Society, and the president for The Vibraphone Project Inc.Dr. Lau is Premier Artist of Marimba One, Artist Endorser of Black Swamp Percussion, and Signature Artist of Encore/Salyers Mallets. In his spare time he is an avid yoga practitioner and believes proper alignment can get rid of certain soreness in percussion playing. He is also a Level 1 Master Knitter from The Knitter’s Guild Association.
Ken Ueno
A Rome Prize and Berlin Prize recipient, Ken Ueno (上野 ケン) is a composer, performer, sound artist, and scholar whose music is championed by leading performers and ensembles worldwide. His work Shiroi Ishi, written for the Hilliard Ensemble, remained in their repertoire for over a decade, while Pharmakon was toured internationally by Eighth Blackbird for several seasons. In 2011, MaerzMusik presented a portrait concert of his work. In 2024, he was featured guest composer at the Takefu International Music Festival, where the Arditti String Quartet introduced his latest string quartet and Tosiya Suzuki premiered his chamber concerto for bass recorder. This spring, he returned to MaerzMusik with Cybernetic Entanglements, a new work created with Viola Yip.
As a vocalist, Ueno is known for pioneering extended vocal techniques, particularly his use of the megaphone. He has performed his vocal concerto with major orchestras including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the
Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, and the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra. He has collaborated with artists such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ikue Mori, Du Yun, DJ Sniff, Rebecca Lloyd- Jones, Karen Yu, and Wukir Suryadi of Senyawa. Ueno’s sound art installations have been exhibited internationally, including at MUAC (Mexico City), the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts, and the Telfair Museum. Daedalus Drones, an immersive fence-labyrinth animated by flying drones, premiered in Hong Kong in 2021. In 2025, C-Lab (Taipei) presented Roomba Calligraphy, in which robotic vacuums with custom 3D-printed speaker holders brush graphite dust across platforms while spatializing microtonal difference tones.
A Professor at UC Berkeley, his writings have appeared in The Oxford Handbook, The New York Times, Palgrave Macmillan, The Drama Review (TDR), and Wiley & Sons. He co-edited East Asian Voices of Resistance Against Racism in Music and recently guest-edited Sonic Ideas, the journal of the Mexican Center for Music and Sound Arts (CMMAS), dedicated to AI and music. His monograph albums have been released on BMOP Sound (Talus—a collection of three orchestral concertos) and New Focus Recordings (Wavelengths—an anthology of three percussion works recorded by members of the Up:Strike Project).