HKU Bulletin November 2009 (Vol. 11 No .1)

26 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin 27 November 2009 “I was very keen on world music,” he says. “Despite my work with classical musicians and the Hong Kong Philharmonic I loved conga, bongo, and the African drum. In 1991 my colleague and I started the first African drum group in Hong Kong.” His many awards are too numerous to mention here but, in 2002 and 2007, he made headlines by leading 10,000 young percussionists in a performance to mark the fifth and the tenth anniversaries of the Establishment of the Hong Kong SAR and the events set two new Guinness world records. At the HKU concert, in addition to play with Mark, Dr Lung teamed up with percussionist Choy Lap-tak and pianist Peter Fan to play the work of composers Mui Kwong-chiu, a HKU graduate, and Ng King-pan, currently undertaking a PhD in HKU’s School of Humanities. Ng King-pan’s Wild Thinking Piece (translated from Chinese), “is a very nice and challenging piece,” says Dr Lung. “I used the marimba, and play a duet with the piano. Another movement called Emotions includes ‘Emptiness’ ‘Happiness’ and ‘Anger’ so there was a lot of variety in the notes, expression, speed. “I have been working together with Mui Kwong-chiu for a few years now and he likes to do multimedia. Percussive Colours includes a movement called Water so I used a lot of water and wine bottles, another is called For more than a decade Lung Heung-wing and Mark Lung have been charming audiences worldwide with their father-son performances on a variety of percussion instruments. And in November they played at HKU, where father Lung Heung-wing is University Artist and son, Mark, is studying Business. The pair has played together since Mark was six years old, although Mrs Lung insists her son has been gripped by the rhythm since he was in the womb. “She says that during an African drum performance by his father he was jumping up and down and only stopped when the performance ended,” laughs Dr Lung. “The drum is one of the world’s oldest instruments,” he says. “All children are natural drummers, it reflects the heartbeat. People like percussion because it’s natural, everything from tapping your fingers when you’re bored, to walking has a rhythm.” In 2003, Mark won critical acclaim as soloist with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra in their Asian and European tour. The London Times described his performance at the Barbican Hall, London, as “Remarkable, impossibly cute, with absolute precision, and engineering gestures with uncanny accuracy.” Since then, despite his love of music, he has chosen to branch out and is now in the second year of his undergraduate degree in the Faculty of Business and Economics. However, he has not fully abandoned the drum and continues to perform regularly. As University Artist, Dr Lung will give a series of concerts and interact with colleagues and students through workshops and performances. He plays a variety of both tuned and unturned percussion instruments including the vibraphone and marimba, a five- octave keyboard instrument. A pianist since the age of six, he started playing the xylophone with the Hong Kong Children’s Choir. His lucky break came in 1978 when he auditioned for the Hong Kong Jockey Club Music Fund and won a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London to study percussion. After graduation he went to study at Juilliard School in New York and took his masters at the University of Reading in the UK. On returning to Hong Kong he spent 19 years as percussionist with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Bamboo, Wood and Stone so I used bamboo chimes and different stones. It also had visuals, a film projected on-screen of water and colours flowing to music. You have to be really open-minded to look for objects that create different sounds,” he says. “However, we only perform the Overture for the HKU concert which will include a lot of drums.” Clearly, there’s plenty of room for improvisation. “Percussion is all about experimentation, finding new sounds. On Father’s Day one of the shopping malls invited my son and I to give a concert so we had to find things that reflected father figures. I went to the warehouse and bought traffic signs, road barriers, safety helmets, traffic cones so kids could join in. We even found anvils and the children played using hammers. It was a lot of fun. He must drive his wife crazy at home. “Yes,” he laughs. “She refuses to go to the supermarket with me because I only go to try out new sounds on wine bottles, pots and pans!” HKU’s Main Building may be the grandfather on campus, but to Ang Lee its tiled floors and wide, arched balconies resonate with the innocence of society before war and revolution brought radical change. That made it the perfect setting to film the early scenes in Lust, Caution , based on Eileen Chang’s short story, which deals with espionage and dark sexual lust during the Japanese occupation of China. “It’s very hard to find a place like this, in Hong Kong or anywhere, where you can totally devote yourself to the age of innocence. The courtyards, the hallways – the place hasn’t changed. It’s really a place of innocence. The sense of innocence and innocence lost is a common theme that appears in just about all the films I’ve made,” Lee said. Lee’s own innocence stretches back to the moment when he discovered his love of the theatre, an experience he found echoed in Chang’s story. He had disappointed his father by failing the university entrance exams twice, and went to an arts college where he tried out the stage. “I was facing darkness and as the spotlight hit my eyes, I remember my eyelid kind of sparkling. It was a magical, electrifying moment for me and I knew my life would be changed. I belonged to somewhere out there and not in real life. After that I was in a state of shock. I went out that night eating with my friends, walking and singing in the drizzling rain. It was exactly the same picture as the scene in Eileen Chang’s story,” he said. “One of the reasons I made the film was because of how much she loved the stage, how much she loved that illusional world which is more truthful than the real world. In some ways I believe in movies more than I do in real life. “Only through pretending, through acting, do you actually get in touch with the true self. Which is a fascinating idea. It’s kind of existential, a yin-yang thing. Maybe the negative space is more truthful because it doesn’t have matter, it doesn’t change. Maybe something fixed on celluloid is more permanent.” He does not elaborate on the loss of innocence in his life, but it is fair to say the reaction in Asia to Lust, Caution bit hard. There were strong opinions, negative and positive, and Lee felt the weight of them. “For me a strong response is a good thing because I think the movie is disturbing, provocative, it really challenges our collective consciousness, our karma together, our history. I think patriotism, the group structure, is something we so much rely on as being Chinese. “[But] I got crushed by the expectations and thinking psychologically that I was facing the whole Chinese community, so to speak. It pushed 10 times more nerves than portraying an American gay couple,” a reference to Brokeback Mountain , for which Lee won the Best Director Oscar in 2006. One of the problems was that, for a change, Lee was an insider to the subject he was filming by virtue of being Chinese. He usually prefers to describe himself as an outsider – a Taiwanese director based in the US who grew up on an island far from his parents’ home villages in China. “As an outsider, you see things differently. You want to be honest with yourself, you want to make a statement, you want to be truthful. What an outsider doesn’t have is narcissism. When I make a Chinese film I have some of that and I have to deal with it. It’s harder to break through with some true statement. Making American films is much easier,” he said. Being an outsider also helps in, of all things, love. “My closest feeling to love is actually quite abstract. It’s a lot like Brokeback Mountain . You find yourself chasing the meaning of it, trying to get a clear picture of it, but you can never find it. The more you’re confused, the more romantic and grand it is. That’s how I believe in love. I think if we knew what love was, we would have stopped making love stories 3,000 years ago. Being an outsider, not knowing what love exactly is, that’s okay. I like being able to watch things in the mist.” Lee was in Hong Kong for the opening of his latest film , Taking Woodstock. He is currently making a movie based on the book , The Life of Pi. RESPONDING TO THE rhythm A father and son duo got the audience clapping to the beat at their November concert. ANG LEE KEEPS A promise When Academy Award-winning director, Ang Lee, filmed Lust, Caution at HKU in 2006, he promised to return. He appeared in October before a packed and appreciative audience at Loke Yew Hall. People Arts and Culture