Alex Zhang Hungtai, Che Chen, Leo Chang

APPEARING: MANHATTAN MARATHON @ ZURCHER GALLERY

FRIDAY, JANUARY 12, 2024

Che Chen is a composer, guitarist/multi-instrumentalist and independent concert organizer based in Queens, NY. Born in 1978 to Taiwanese immigrant parents, Chen studied painting, printmaking and sculpture at Boston University and Concordia University (Montreal) before returning to music. He is best known as the guitarist of 75 Dollar Bill, a critically lauded band he founded with percussionist Rick Brown in 2012, but is also active as an improviser and solo performer. Inspired as a teenager by the DIY ethos of the post-hardcore punk scene in Washington DC, near where he grew up, Chen has been an energetic show organizer in the NYC underground since moving there in the early 2000s. While mostly a self-taught musician, he has studied music with Mauritanian guitarist Jeich Ould Chigaly, and Haitian drumming, Persian music, and Javanese Gamelan with various teachers in NYC. He has been awarded commissions by the Jerome Foundation/Roulette Intermedium, and ISSUE Project Room, grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and Art Matters Foundation, and residencies at MacDowell and the Santa Fe Art Institute. 75 Dollar Bill has found critical acclaim in WIRE Magazine (“Best Album of 2019”), Pitchfork, BOMB Magazine, Uncut, Mojo, and other online and print outlets.

Leo Chang is a Korean improviser, composer, performer, and scholar of experimental music currently living in Brooklyn. Born in Seoul, Leo lived as an expat in Singapore, Taipei, and Shanghai, and then moved to the United States in 2011. Needing to assimilate to various cultures and thereby cultivating an irreverence towards rules and norms from a young age, Leo expresses rootlessness and multiplicity within identities through his music. Leo traces the origins of his fractured identity formation to colonial legacies that continue to this day. His art is an act of home-making inspired by various musical and ideological movements that have sought to question power dynamics and imagine egalitarian possibilities. His primary methods are improvisation, written text, graphical notation, and electronic processing. 

After retiring his project Dirty Beaches, Alex Zhang Hungtai has been focusing on explorations of improvised music, Free Jazz, and his new role as a composer. His newer compositions predominantly work with saxophone, synthesizers, and percussion, furthering his research on ritualistic music of liminality. Zhang works as a composer for film soundtracks, along with acting in independent films. He currently lives in New York City.