Biography
I grew up in Shantou, a small city in southern China, where I started learning the violin at a very young age. My father, who is still an amateur violin teacher, was the one who introduced me to it. He once told me that when I was still small enough to be carried in his arms, I would cry when I heard Milstein playing Romance No. 2 in F major, but never reacted in the same way to other music. He took that as a sign that I was already responding to music in my own way.
For the first ten years, however, I was anything but a passionate musician! I was part of a group violin class and was one of its weaker students, and practising at home was often a battle. Things changed when I discovered my father’s collection of more than a hundred CDs and DVDs. I became fascinated by the world I found in those recordings – Kogan’s Beethoven, Vengerov’s Saint-Saëns, Heifetz’s Prokofiev, Mahler and Brahms symphonies, and countless other recordings. I even discovered recordings by musicians I would later encounter in London. It felt like discovering an entirely new world.
By the time I reached high school, I knew that music was something I wanted to pursue. I came to London to study at Trinity Laban, and this was another turning point. For the first time, I was free to decide how I wanted to spend my time, and I found myself spending entire days in practice rooms, rehearsals and concerts simply because I wanted to. My teacher, Pieter Schoeman, helped me turn that enthusiasm into a continuous process of listening, solving problems and improving. His guidance has had a profound influence on my musical development, particularly in my approach to sound, intonation, style and musical interpretation.
I have since become increasingly drawn to orchestral and chamber music. I love the enormous repertoire, but even more, I love the process of making music collectively – listening, responding, solving problems and sometimes leading. Performing with the Asian Youth Orchestra, becoming concertmaster of the 2025 Young Music Culture the Greater Bay Area (YMCG) Festival Orchestra under Daniel Harding, and working with ensembles including the London Mozart Players and Royal Northern Sinfonia have all shaped me as a musician.
I am still driven by the same curiosity I discovered in those old recordings. I want to keep learning, listening, travelling and finding new things to explore – and, ideally, to keep making music with other people for a very long time.