be.longing.home –
The Worlds of Composer Lam Bun-Ching

Introduction 
Events 

being at home, longing for home, belonging

This exhibition explores the multiplicity of home through the life and work of the composer Lam Bun-Ching.

What is home? Where is home? Can homes be localised or found? Can a community form and become home? Can nature be home? Can musical homes be localised? How does identifying a home, searching and longing for a home become a political act? What happens when personal home and identity become political? By whom can home be attributed? Can a person be adopted, adopted by a community or political institution?

Lam Bun-Ching is one of the most successful and industrious composers of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Institute of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University looks back on a long history of collaboration with Lam: In 2009, a CD of her pieces was produced in Heidelberg, and her opera Wenji was performed there 2019. In 2022, the CATS Library acquired a collection of her manuscripts, sheet music, audio and video recordings, personal documents, note and sketch books and letters. The exhibition draws on this collection and – for the first time – provides an insight into Lam's creative process, showing her sketches and manuscripts. A selection of recordings, some of them newly digitised, will give you an acoustic impression of Lam's sound worlds. The documents shown are mostly from the period between 1970 and 2003; Lam's later work is not represented in the collection to date.

Lam Bun-Ching walks between worlds – she grew up in Macao, studied first in Hong Kong and later in the USA. She worked first in Seattle, later in New York and Paris and has found community in a tight-knit group of international composers and performers of new music, Asian-American artists and Chinese composers. These multiple identities/homelands are reflected in the multiple musical traditions and practices, musical genres and languages she employs in her work.

This exhibition is accompanied by ten audio samples, which you can listen to via the MP3 players on display or via the web portal. This musical showcase gives you an insight into the life of the composer and her creative process. In addition to notes on selected pieces, some of her manuscripts are also shown here. Full versions of the manuscripts and scores are available in a scorebook and can be read alongside the audio samples.

Curators

Research and concept
L. Odila Schröder, Hanno Lecher, Barbara Mittler, October 2024

Design
Susann Henker

Multimedia presentation
Sebastian Vogt