Live Guqin Performance
Friday 26 June, 14.30 -16.30
Clore Balcony
When Sound Becomes Space
Pause on the Clore Balcony and encounter a live guqin performance unfolding in real time. The guqin, a traditional Chinese instrument known for its tranquil but resonant tones, invites a slower mode of listening. Visitors may move through, linger, or listen more closely as sound drifts across the balcony and into the museum below. It creates a shifting acoustic environment, where moments of attention, distraction and discovery coexist. This open-format event explores how listening and attention takes shape within the museum space.
About the Performer
Hetian Lyu is a guqin performer and an MSc student in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She is a seventh-generation practitioner of the Sichuan guqin tradition, trained within a lineage that emphasises attentive listening and subtle acoustic expression. Her research spans sensory anthropology, multimodality, phenomenology, soundscape and acoustemology, with additional expertise in immersive plays and embodied performance. As both a curator and a performer, she integrates musical practice with anthropological inquiry to examine how live sound shapes attention, space and the museum experience.
