be.longing.home – The Worlds of Composer Lam Bun-Ching

being at home, longing for home, belonging

The exhibition explores the multiplicity of home through the life and work of the composer Lam Bun-Ching.

What is home? Where is home? Can homes be localised or found? Can a community form and become home? Can nature be home? How does identifying a home, searching and longing for a home become a political act? What happens when personal home and identity become political? By whom can home be attributed? Can a person be adopted, adopted by a community or political institution?

Lam Bun-Ching is one of the most successful and industrious composers of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Institute of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University looks back on a long history of collaboration with Lam: In 2009, a CD of her pieces was produced in Heidelberg, and her opera Wenji was performed here in 2019 under the title Zerrissen. In 2022, the CATS Library acquired a collection of her manuscripts, sheet music, audio and video recordings, personal documents, note and sketch books and letters. The exhibition draws on this collection and – for the first time – provides an insight into Lam’s creative process, showing her sketches and manuscripts. A selection of recordings, some of them newly digitised, will give you an acoustic impression of Lam’s sound worlds. The documents shown are mostly from the period between 1970 and 2003; Lam’s later work is not represented in the collection to date.

A cooperation between CATS, the CATS Library, and the Confucius Institute at Heidelberg University.

For more information please visit the exhibition’s webpage.