So what can we do?
We try our best to remind ourselves to be grateful for our privileges. The opportunities created for us by our families, by this land, by all the generations and cultures that have played a part in the story of forming this complex, multidimensional community.
I’ve often struggled with the role of an artist as being privileged or indulgent.
While there are so many issues and injustices in our world today, particularly highlighted by COVID, we are able to live this lifestyle filled with art and adventures and friends … the time, safety, energy, and resources to even consider these ‘projects’.
So what do we do?
We’re trying to understand. To keep searching for questions to ask, to be humble, hopeful, realistic, empathetic, aware.
We are here trying to bring light and hope in some tangible way. Is just the music enough? Or do we need to find some way to translates these concept beyond the music in to action?
While Song of Praise explores our Chinese heritage, it also uses the framework of multiculturalism to address some of challenges and problems in our current times.
Throughout the program, we encourage our listeners to reflect on these challenges, whether personal or public, spiritual or political, and to put this improved awareness into written words as a gesture of our collective wishes, efforts, and promises to build a better future, one slip of paper at a time.
Perhaps small, perhaps idealistic, but perhaps the gesture will plant a seed or nurture a healthier growth sometime, somewhere.
“The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job, that was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed ... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events ... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.”
-Bernstein
Well, we are forever works in progress. Thank you for your effort and attention and sincerity to help us better understand one another. <3 Thank you for listening.
