Karen Yu

Karen Yu is a percussionist, sound artist, and curator based in Hong Kong whose work moves across sound-making, audience engagement, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Drawing on her background as a classically trained percussionist, her practice centers on improvisation with sound objects and bodily movement, examining how sound weaves people and spaces together through collaborative experiences.  She continually reimagines her percussion practice, from sound to space to the performing body, allowing the body to shift from instrument to living archive, where labor, vulnerability, and fragility accumulate and become legible. She is the artistic director of Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong, co-founder of the chamber percussion group, The Up:Strike Project, and percussionist of Hong Kong New Music Ensemble.

Her recent commissions include installations and compositions for The Darkest Hour at 3am (2025), UNHEARD Sound & Music festival (2025), and performances for Hong Kong Arts Centre & Castlefield Gallery (2022), Axel Vervoordt Gallery Hong Kong (2021), Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (2021), and Freespace, West Kowloon Cultural District (2020). As a performer, Karen has appeared in performances including Z0AR (2025), Ground on Ground (2025), manτεία (manteia; 2024), Since When (2023), and Somnium (2022).

She is also co-artistic director, with Kenny Wong, of R = Live / Lines (2026), an interactive installation-performance in which fifteen robotic stones drift, listen, and respond to human presence in a blackbox turned living stone garden. Alongside her performance practice, Karen works closely with a collective, consisting of Joseph Lee, Lawrence Lau, and Michael Li, in an ongoing research project investigating scores and notation as mediums and languages for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Drawing on this research, her solo recital Three Movements for Percussionist (2026) strips away instruments one by one, from an extended drum set to a single woodblock to the body alone, ending in memory.

As a curator, Karen leads PLUCK TO SOUND (formerly “Sound Forms”, a co-presentation with Tai Kwun Contemporary), the annual sound festival organized by Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong. She has also co-curated five editions of UNHEARD, an annual sound and music festival co-presented with Eaton Hong Kong and _dtby, as well as the Noise Fest at Freespace West Kowloon. Committed to deepening public engagement with sound practices, she initiated Push the ENVELOPE, a Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong educational project dedicated to diversifying listening approaches and cultivating awareness of sound-making as an art form, and has published a paper on this initiative with ACC Science and Publishing. Through this and other initiatives, Karen continues to advocate for sound as a social, pedagogical, and creative practice in contemporary culture.

Karen has been an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Seoul Dance Center, and a fellow of the Blackbird Creative Lab. Her performance and installation work have been featured at major festivals and institutions including Art Central Hong Kong, Biennale Montréal, Gold Gallery (Serakai Studio), HKU Muse, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, Hong Kong New Vision Arts Festival, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, IRCAM ManiFeste Academy, Liveworks Festival at Carriageworks Sydney, Music Biennale Zagreb, Oil Street Art Space, Para Site Hong Kong, Peer-to-Peer: UK/HK, Percussive Arts Society Day of Percussion, Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Transplanted Roots Percussion Research Symposium, Vertixe Sonora Festivals, and West Kowloon Jazz Fest and Popfest.

Her performances and interviews have been featured by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Naxos Records, and Radio Television Hong Kong. Karen has also given guest lectures and talks at institutions including the City University of Hong Kong, Conservatorio Superior de Música de Vigo, Harvard Graduate Music Forum, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, inventor inventor initiative (iii), Lingnan University, the Ubiquitous Music Conference 12 at the University of Saint Joseph Macao, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hong Kong. In 2025, she released Wavelengths with Ken Ueno on New Focus Recordings. 

Karen received her Master of Music and Bachelor of Music degrees in Percussion Performance from McGill University, where she studied with Professor Aiyun Huang and Fabrice Marandola, supported by the Schulich Graduate Fellowship. Her artistic research and projects have received support from the Asian Cultural Council, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology (CIRMMT), East Kowloon Cultural Centre, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, and the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau of the Hong Kong SAR. She currently teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the School of Theatre & Entertainment Arts at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. 

Outside of her artistic work, Karen is a dedicated sour beer enthusiast who finds creative resonance in the slow craft of fermentation.