Karen Yu

Karen Yu is a percussionist, sound artist, and curator based in Hong Kong whose work explores the intersections of sound-making, audience engagement, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Drawing from her background as a classically trained percussionist, her creative practice centers on improvisation with sound objects and bodily movement, examining how sound weaves people and spaces together through collaborative experiences.

In her most recent solo recital, “Three Movements for Percussionist”, she reimagines what a percussion practice may be, from sound, to space, to the performing body, but also allowing her body to shift from acting as an instrument, to becoming a living archive where labor, vulnerability, risk, and fragility accumulate and become legible.She is the artistic director of Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong, the co-founder of the chamber percussion group,The Up:Strike Project, and an associate musician of Hong Kong New Music Ensemble.

Her recent commissions include installations and compositions for The Darkest Hour at 3am (group exhibition, 2025), and UNHEARD sound & music festival at Eaton Hong Kong (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 Ground on Ground (2025), a multimedia performance premiered at the Liveworks Festival at Carriageworks Sydney; manτεία (manteia; 2024), a performance incorporating AI tools as an act of divination directed by Peter Nelson and Roberto Trillo; Since When (2023), a multimedia theatre work by Joyce Tang and Chow Yiu Fai; and Somnium (2022), an installation-opera-trance by Steve Hui (NERVE). 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.

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 Biennale Montréal, Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong Sound Forms, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, Hong Kong New Vision Arts Festival, IRCAM ManiFeste Academy, Liveworks Festival, 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, West Kowloon Jazz Fest and Popfest, and Music Biennale Zagreb. In 2025, she released Wavelengths, an album on New Focus Recordings in collaboration with Ken Ueno.

As a performer, she has worked with a wide range of artists and composers including Angus Lee, Annika Socolofsky, cehryl, Chan Hing Yan, Charles Kwong, Chow Yiu Fai, Daniel Lo, Gaybird Leung, Germaine Kruip, Jean-Pierre Drouet, Joyce Tang, Ken Ueno, Kenny Wong, Lawrence Lau, Marina Rosenfeld, Michael Pisaro, Omid Asadi, Olivier Cong, Philippe Leroux, Samson Young, Samuel Swope, Simon Steen-Andersen, Steve Hui (NERVE), Tan Dun, Vinko Globokar, Zihua Tan, and hirsk. 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 a range of 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.

As a curator, Karen leads PLUCK TO SOUND (formerly Sound Forms/HICCUP, co-presented with Tai Kwun Contemporary), the annual sound festival organized by Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong. She has also co-curated 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 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 Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology (CIRMMT), the 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.