Kelvin King Fung Ng

United Kingdom °1985
affiliation: University of Huddersfield
en

Kelvin King Fung NG is currently a PhD researcher and part-time lecturer at the University of Huddersfield, U.K. Originally from Hong Kong, he has also studied composition in Graz, Kansas City and Hong Kong. His works have been performed in Austria, Australia, China, Hong Kong (China), the Faroe Islands, France, Germany, Slovenia, South Korea, Switzerland and the United States, featuring distinguished and engaged artists and ensembles. Ng's works germinate from the core concern of us as spatio-temporally co-existing beings, structuring available materials to examine conditions and issues such as presence, consciousness and intersubjectivity at the existential level. In this context, his works align closely with philosophical concepts by thinkers such as Nancy and Rancière. In his artistic research, Ng draws on knowledge from anthropology, embodied cognition, semiotics, media theories, as well as cultural and spiritual practices to shed light on the artistic challenges that arise.

www.kelvinng.info

research

research expositions

  • Dispositions of Being-With: Redistributing Heterogeneity among the Concert Audience (2025) author(s): Kelvin King Fung Ng published in: Research Catalogue
    The concert setting, as standardised through the worldwide prevalence of Western Classical music, offers a unique condition in which audience members from various backgrounds coexist in the same time and space, and are prompted to act and interact, restrictedly yet often intensely, by attending and orienting themselves to a medium frequently marked by its intangibility and ineffability. Despite such a richly layered social practice, existing musical works that aim to bring about divergent models of communion tend to eschew this listening convention, rather than harnessing the aforementioned characteristics to unleash new forms of togetherness. My artistic research seeks to instigate such novel social configurations by creating musical works that articulate previously unexposed relationships among concert audience members. Through factoring in their differing preconditions relative to the performance, my works aim to redistribute what can be sensed by whom (Rancière 2004). Grounded in a pragmatist view of music-listener co-articulation, I introduce the concepts of circumscribed and preferred affordances. Their dynamics at work are examined through pieces that resonate with my approach, including und als wir (1993) by Mathias Spahlinger and Quadraturen V (2000) by Peter Ablinger. These help illuminate my strategies in redistributing the sensible while motivating intersubjective awareness, as exemplified in D!V£R#!M&NT! (2024) and Brief Version of Seoljanggu (2021–), which configure heterogeneous sets of affordances in relation to individual and cultural differences. Knowledge and experiences generated through this endeavour aim to deepen our understanding of the intricate intersubjectivities of listening, while also opening new routes for broader reflections on the social dimensions of human relations.
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