Following the release of her critically-acclaimed debut album YIAN earlier this year, Lucinda Chua today shares her brand new EP ‘Reclaiming The Rose’, out now via 4AD.
Speaking on the concept behind the EP, Lucinda explains:
“Following the release of YIAN, I had the opportunity to perform my music and connect with new audiences across Europe and Asia.
Reclaiming The Rose is a bi-lingual meditation exploring ideas of returning, remembering and retracing ancestral roots. I was inspired by the journey of the rose; a plant indigenous to China that made its way to the UK in the 1700s. I met the artist and poet He Sun at a music festival in Italy and found a kinship with one of her poems. I wanted to set these words to music, to hear the words spoken in both their English and Mandarin form. I asked my friend Xiaoqiao to join me on the final song.”
‘Reclaiming The Rose’ expands sonically on YIAN, acting as an epilogue to Lucinda’s debut album. Opener ‘The Maze’, sees stunning ethereal instrumentation underpin a spoken word piece from Lucinda, whilst ‘Rose Garden’ takes Lucinda’s piano based writing and translates it to the guitar, creating a Radiohead-esque moment of beauty and a moment of stark difference to ‘YIAN’.
The EP ends with ‘Remembering The Rose’’ a beautifully tender duet with musician and harpist Xiaoqiao, co-produced by Chua and collaborators BON.”
Since the release of YIAN, Chua has been developing her live shows across the UK and further afield, performing at festivals such as Rally and Mirrors in London, alongside festival spots for Rewire in the Netherlands, Lost Festival in Italy and Mucho Flow in Portugal. She also performed alongside Kelsey Lu in Beijing for Hermes, was the first international guest invited to take part in homegrown live sessions in Shanghai, improvised a two-piece set for the Gagosian Art Gallery in London for the “Christo: Early Works” exhibit, and performed alongside Coby Sey and Talvin Singh as part of Nicholas Daley’s Woven Rhythms Festival in London’s Southbank Centre.
LISTEN: Reclaiming The rose
“The songs on ‘Yian’…are meditations seeking serenity” – The New York Times
“[YIAN] is pensive and patient, moving with a naturally predetermined ebb and flow that would be wrong to disrupt.” – The FADER
“Chua creates landscapes out of the hollow spaces within her. Each track becomes its own kind of home” – Pitchfork
“part of a wave of artists doing fascinating experimental music rooted in classical traditions” – Stereogum
“Chua glides across the emotional currents of a crystalline landscape.” – PAPER
“‘YIAN’ will surely rank as one of 2023’s most impressive British debuts.” – CLASH
“Poised ambient pop topped with Chua’s soothing vocal, mesmerisingly looped over and over, focusing on the act of healing and accepting herself” – The Guardian
Reclaiming The Rose Artwork
Lucinda Chua
Reclaiming The Rose
December 7th 2023
- The Maze
- Rose Garden
- Remembering The Rose (ft. Xiaoqiao)
About Lucinda Chua:
The swallow is a migratory creature, a songbird that flies between its homes in two places. Artist Lucinda Chua has a different idea about them. “Maybe swallows actually live in the sky. Maybe the infinite sky is where their home really is, and those land masses that they fly between are just resting points. They’re untethered – if you belong to the sky, you can belong to everywhere.” It is from this idea that Chua’s debut solo album, YIAN, takes flight.
Chua sees this essence of the swallow mirrored in herself, and ingrained in her name. “Yian” means swallow in Chinese, and is part of “Siew Yian”, the name given to Chua by her parents to preserve her connection with her Chinese heritage. YIAN takes its name from these confluences.
Building on the warm, elemental soundscape of 2021’s Antidotes EPs and the moody, elegant timbre of her cello, Chua self-produced and engineered 8 of YIAN’s 10 tracks, spurred on by a call to true artistic integrity and authorship. A deeply introspective and fully realised vessel of creative expression, YIAN emerges as less an album than a worldview, a commitment to learning and uncovering one’s own selfhood honed over Chua’s lifelong reconciliation with her own personal history and identity.
“The record echoes my search for an ‘unknown’ part of myself, something I inherited but didn’t fully understand”, Chua says. Born to an English mother and a Chinese-Malaysian father with part indigenous Malaysian ancestry, she grew up in the English town of Milton Keynes. Her parents did not speak Mandarin, and her surroundings lacked a strong Asian community or role models who looked like her. Imposter syndrome and outsiderdom weaved themselves into the fabric of her identity, leaving her feeling caught in-between and even inauthentic. But how can one be inauthentic as themselves?
Chua began her work on YIAN in search of the missing piece, for an answer to the disconnect from her Chinese heritage. “Who do I turn to, when I don’t look like you?”, she whispers softly on “Golden.” The song begins as a quiet, uncertain call from Chua singing alone to the universe, but Chua is soon joined on the track by her friends, musicians Laura Groves and Fran Lobo. “To be the first, to be the first”, they sing together. Their voices conjoin, lifting the song into a luminous, anthemic entreaty to Chua’s younger self – to show forgiveness for the grey areas inside her, and to feel proud of that precious space and all the possibilities it promises. “When the sunlight hits me / I’m golden you’ll see.” What began as a series of questions, a longing for wholeness, ended up leading Chua to a different set of answers. “I learned there is no missing piece. Wholeness comes through the experiences we uncover throughout our entire lives and the things we’ll learn about ourselves. It’s about making peace with the empty space inside of us, and holding space for the growth that allows.”
Like it always has, music served as a framework for Chua to heal. In making YIAN, she found new language through which to express her experiences. This language lay in the practices she developed, and the creative community with whom she built solidarity – co-authoring visual identities with creative collaborators Tash Tung, Jade Ang Jackman and Nhu Xuan Hua, conceiving artistic universes with set designers Lydia Chan, Jonquil Lawrence and Erin Tse, and telling stories through dance with movement directors Chantel Foo and Duane Nasis. “I thought about my younger self and the sense of community that I didn’t have. I can’t change the past, but I can try to create a piece of language that allows somebody else to now feel seen and heard.” As Chua sings over sensuous harmonies and delicate soul-infused piano on Echo (she calls it a “pop song about ancestral trauma”),“I won’t carry your shame / Won’t be your echo again… I couldn’t be anyone else / I look to you, I see myself”. Closure arrived not in the form of neat answers, but through the work itself.
Mid-way through the record comes An Ocean, one of its most “emotionally raw” tracks. The ocean represents a simultaneous state of pressure and weightlessness for Chua, with the feeling of moving through and pushing against the resistance of the water embodying the way we express our “chi”, our energetic life force, through intentionality and movement. She sings of a yearning for love and belonging over delicate and minimal production: “When I look for your love, like I’m never enough / I feel the calling from the ocean, the ocean my friend”. The music video, directed by Chua and shot on-location during an artist residency in Mallorca in the freezing December cold, embodies this “surrendering of the ego”, with Chua staring unflinchingly into the lens as she sings from the ocean. Bringing things full circle, she wears a dress hand-sewed from the set material of the Golden music video. “Making the dress was transformative, a kind of meditation. It tied the threads together from the Golden chapter of YIAN – an experience that made me feel so connected to the people around me – and turned that feeling into a physical material that I could wear on my person.”
Creative authorship was paramount for Chua, who wanted the album to be in her voice – not just her singing voice, but in every sound-making choice from instrumentation, to effects processing, to how she set up each mic in the room. What results on YIAN is a distinctive and peerless sound of Chua’s own, flowing directly from her fingertips, unconstrained by convention. “It’s that feeling of untethering”, she considers. “Decolonising the mind from the idea that there’s a singular way of doing things. Feeling led form: a lot of my engineering choices were to make me feel safe in the studio being vulnerable about my experiences.” Conscious to hold space within her music for people to live inside, Chua thought often of YIAN’s sound in terms of sonic spacing. The hushed, flickering tones of Autumn Leaves Don’t Come and swelling strings of instrumental Grief Piece sound completely intimate, like she’s singing into your ear, yet capacious, like soft cocoons of sound. “For me, the music is like a home.”
Chua invites friend and fellow genre-defying, post-classical artist Yeule into this home on final track “Something Other Than Years,” a gentle song about searching for guidance. “Show me how to live this life / Something other than years”, Chua calls out. “There’s more in this life / Angel being of light”, Yeule sings back, the artists’ unique voices intertwining over a feeling of infinite space. The two recorded the track in an “ASMR cave” set up by Chua, where they lay on the studio floor on a bed of cushions surrounded by mics in stereo. From this cave springs a warm swirl of sound in infinite layers, spacious and reassuring.
As much as the music itself, Chua’s cultivation of a Chinese dance practice over recent years is core to the story of YIAN. Chua returned to dance after struggling with the conservative constraints of ballet as a child, finding intuition and affirmation in the fluidity and naturalism of Chinese classical, fan & ribbon and contemporary. Dance is entwined in the very texture of YIAN, with Chua undertaking deep study of Chinese dance forms whilst working on the album – the “Echo” music video, Chua’s take on a choreographed pop MV, is a moving and innovative homage to Chinese dance, martial arts and the elements. Visually, the video is also inspired by the cult movies Chua grew up with (think Lady Snowblood, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Kill Bill, The Grudge and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), whose hyper-stylised female Asian characters were some of the only on-screen representation available to Chua in her formative teenage years.
YIAN is as much an unpacking of Chua’s identity as a reinvention of it, a new way of seeing, pieced together through the practise of her artistic craft. “It’s like what I do with the cello, a classical instrument with so many historic undertones – running it through the pedals, changing its voice, playing it standing up, hacking with the meaning and symbolism of it. I respect the past, yet build upon it in my search for a feeling of freedom.”
