Composer (/curator/writer/researcher) Mu-Xuan Lin (林慕萱) (b.1984, Taiwan/USA) defines her life as a quest for an artistic autonomy poetically engendered by both its will and its vulnerability to one’s corporeal experience and to the world one lives in. Having extensive training in the visual arts and creative writing and frequent exposure to theatre, dance, and literature from an early age, and profound influences from the cinema, Mu-Xuan is interested in the montage and the mise-en-scène of contemporary individuals’ fragmented yet interlaced truths, of the confusion of time and place, and of identities construed and broken. She creates with an emphasis on the kinetic formulation and transfer between various expressive art forms or matters with the sonic and temporal one.
Dr. Lin enjoys an international career; her music has been heard worldwide and on SOOND (EU) and ein_klang (Austria) records, and at many festivals and series such as Festival AFEKT (Estonia), Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), Innovation Series (Taiwan), and Piano Spheres (Los Angeles). She has worked with Ensemble Proton Bern (Switzerland), Ensemble Adapter (Germany), Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart (Germany), Avanti! Chamber Orchestra (Finland), International Contemporary Ensemble (NYC), Urbanity Dance (Boston), and pianist Vicki Ray among others, and is working with ensemble 3peoplemusic (三個人, Taipei), duo NéMeu (Paris), 20º dans le noir (Paris), and sheng artist Li-Chin Li (Taiwan).
As a researcher and writer, her article “The Erotic and the Melancholy of a Sincere Postmodern Identity – the cinematic spaces and a vulnerable time” will be published by Cambridge Scholars in the volume "Crossing into Distance: Contemporary Composers on the Present and Future of Art Music" in 2025-26. In 2024-25, she conducted and penned an introduction and an interview (co-authored with Maria Sorensen) with sociologist Klaus Theweleit about his psychoanalytic works on right-wing fascism. Since 2023, in addition to increased activities as a video artist, Mu-Xuan is venturing into the work of performing arts curation and direction, and has founded Studio Nekton (宇宙微波) with Paris-based flutist/performer Shao-Wei Chou. She was the concept-curator, dramaturg, visual and stage designer of Taiwanese zheng artist Jing-Mu Kuo’s 2023 abstract-theatrical recital “Waterfalls”, and served as the artistic director/conception, visual and stage designer, media artist, and co-producer for Studio Nekton’s 2024-25 multimodal program “Speak, Transparence” (France and Taiwan) featuring Shao-Wei Chou, storytelling artist Soma Yang, and herself (as composer-dancer).
Mu-Xuan received her BM in Composition from the New England Conservatory, MFA and Ph.D. in Music Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, and Certificate of Advanced Studies in Curating (CAS) at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. She has taught at Brandeis University, California State University Long Beach, and Chapman University. Dr. Lin is the Assistant Professor of Composition at University of California, Berkeley.