Charles Kwong is a composer from Hong Kong. His creative output focuses on orchestral music, chamber compositions for musicians across various musical cultures, site-specific music, and transdisciplinary works that depart from the paradigm of concert music. Approaching music as experiential situations, Kwong’s works often concern with the sensuality of time and space as revealed by sounds and the act of listening, the eclecticism of performance practices in their juxtapositions, site specificity, and the performativity of musical forms and genres.

Kwong’s music has been internationally featured in festivals such as Lucerne Forward, Ultraschall Berlin, Takefu, Ticino Musica, La Roque d'Anthéron, Marvão and IRCAM ManiFeste, among other professional presentations across Europe and Asia. In recent years he has received commissions from Ensemble recherche, Lucerne Festival, Takefu International Music Festival, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (HKNME), and Hong Kong Arts Festival, among others. Other renowned groups and musicians who performed Kwong’s music include London Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble intercontemporain, Ensemble of Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestra UniMi, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Divertimento Ensemble, Ensemble Offspring, Mario Caroli, Jeanne-Marie Conquer, Tadashi Tajima, Tosiya Suzuki, Edward Gardner, Yip Wing-sie, Christoph Poppen and Pierre-André Valade, among others.

Kwong has developed a long and fruitful collaboration with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta since 2014. Their artistic bonding, which includes a two-season appointment of Kwong as the orchestra’s Artist Associate in 2020-2022, has resulted in nine commissions that have been showcased locally and as well globally in the orchestra’s overseas tours. With his role in Contemporary Music Research for the orchestra since 2015, Kwong also has been contributing ideas to the orchestra’s planning in contemporary repertoire and commissioning. 

In 2020-2022, Kwong was engaged by Ensemble recherche for the collaborative project “the new recherche” which researches on the subject of gentrification, for which he wrote Migrating Tracks, which was subsequently performed in Berlin, Munich and Freiburg. For the 60th anniversary of the Hong Kong City Hall, in 2022 Kwong was commissioned the Lullabies - an orchestral piece for the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Edward Gardner, who hailed the work as “wonderful, having a beautiful, light, airy quality, lots of fantasy and a real underlying wistful beauty which the orchestral have really enjoyed indulging in”. In 2016, ensemble intercontemporain performed Kwong’s Lachrymae in their first ever performance in Hong Kong in the ensemble’s history. 

 Kwong’s interest in site specificity and transdisciplinarity of music in recent years led him to leadership roles in several projects in Hong Kong. He was the curator of HKNME’s Our Audible City (2018-2019) - a one-year-long project on the subjects of site specific music, urban soundscape, sound collecting and sound maps - for which he wrote Atlas, a series of site-specific works tailored for six non-concert-hall spaces in Hong Kong. His research in the site-specificity of music subsequently led to the conception of Requiem (2020-2021) commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary, and Lifelike (2021), commissioned for the Hi! Flora Fauna series held in the Hong Kong Botanical and Zoological Garden. In 2022 he was commissioned by the Lucerne Festival for Elsewhere, a site-specific ensemble work to be performed in KKL Luzern Concert hall, whose world premiere was reviewed by Luzern Luzernerzeitung as "enchanting the concert hall". For his research in these aspects, Kwong took artist residencies at the Zurich University of the Arts and at the Tai Kwun Contemporary Artists' Studio in 2020. 

​Born in 1985 in Hong Kong, Kwong in his formative years studied music at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and King’s College London, before earning his doctorate in compositions in 2013 from The University of York under the supervision of Thomas Simaku. Over the years, his artistic development has benefited significantly through tutelages and masterclasses by Toshio Hosokawa, Francesco Filidei, Mauro Lanza and Oscar Bianchi, among others.

Kwong co-founded PROJECT21st in 2019 and has been its Artistic Director since then.

www.charleskwong.com

Watch Charles Kwong’s Imaginary beings 2 for Tadashi Tajima and Tosiya Suzuki (2020), recorded at Ebila Hall, Tokyo in June 2022. The video is part of the Play Further! Video Series.