Ding Yi x LASALLE Arts and Ecology Open Hearth Chat

Following Ding Yi Music Company’s ECOncert 2025, this Open Hearth Chat brings its creative team together with the arts and ecology research team from LASALLE's McNally School of Fine Arts to reflect on sustainability, performance and ecological imagination.

Extending the concert’s exploration of Singapore’s secondary forests, the discussion will delve into the intersections of creative practice and ecological research, towards examining how sound, matter and performance can attune us to new modes of sensing and understanding the more-than-human world. It will also highlight the collaborative process behind crafting instruments from recycled and found materials, and how artistic experimentation can nurture environmental awareness and collective responsibility.

The conversation features creative collaborators Ang Xiao Ting, Robert Zhao and Dedric Wong alongside MA Arts and Ecology and BA (Hons) Fine Arts student researchers and Head, McNally School of Fine Arts and research mentor Dr Cissie Fu, this session invites audiences across the performing and visual arts to consider how artistic inquiry can reframe our relationship with the living and dynamic systems that sustain us, where art can both refract and respond to the ecologies we inhabit. 

This event marks the start of a two-year Ding Yi x LASALLE Arts and Ecology Research Partnership that seeks to express the impact of Ding Yi’s annual ECOncerts from 2023–2025, towards experimenting with a research-informed incubation in 2026 and expanding the creative and ecological contours of the ECOncert in 2027.