Carte Blanche
Kay Zhang – ANCESTRAL ROOTS
Dumama
JazzJazz Modern CreativeSpiritual JazzGroove Jazz
Carte Blanche: Kay Zhang
Every season, the Musicians' Council awards six Cartes Blanches to Zurich musicians. One of the musicians who have received a Carte Blanche in the 2025/2026 season is saxophonist, curator and sound designer Kay Zhang. In an interview, she told me about her project and why this Carte Blanche was actually awarded to three artists at once.
A transcultural exchange to Hong Kong marked another turning point. Kay Zhang began to see music not just as a sonic practice, but as a tool for curatorial and conceptual projects. During this time, she also founded the Collective International Totem (KIT) which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year and which is still a central part of Kay's artistic work today. This was followed by a further Master's degree in Curatorial Studies, which is how she ended up at the independent project space Les Complices* in Zurich, a venue for exhibitions, happenings, concerts and encounters, where she became part of the curatorial team.The saxophone remains their central instrument. Its young age and hybrid history allow stylistic leaps: from classical Western music to jazz, contemporary composition and experimental music to noise, free improvisation and musical theater. "In a way, I followed the historical development of these musical styles," she says, looking back on her own musical development from classical music to noise and free music. Music also becomes a medium for questions of origin: what does it mean to come from a classical-western tradition when biography and affiliations are rooted elsewhere?About the joy of collaborative approaches
Kay Zhang's practice is generally collaborative. Projects arise from ideas and exchanges with other artists. Much of it begins as research and leads to performances, readings, listening sessions, activations or gatherings. Zhang is less interested in format boundaries than in the question of how an idea can be shared and developed together.The collective International Totem has been working in this logic for ten years. The starting point was the classical line-up of saxophone, piano and flute - a format that often occurs in contemporary music, but usually in strictly divided situations: Musicians on stage, audience in passive reception. KIT wanted to break up this framework, offer the audience experiences and explore the relationship between stage and audience in a new way. Video, costume and meta-theatrical elements become tools to make contemporary music more narrative, accessible and spatial.This work, which was recorded in the Kunstraum Walcheturm, is based on an adaptation of Peter Eötvös' Atlantis, for example, with the ensemble and video applying the theme of the sunken city to current topics:
A co-curated Carte Blanche: what's behind it
Kay Zhang sees curating as artistic work. That is why she deliberately shares her Carte Blanche with two co-curators. "It's about working together," she explains, "and understanding how others operate within such formats." Instead of taking center stage herself, she therefore invited the artist and performer Tracy September and Stanford Chen - two people with whom she shares both aesthetic and biographical parallels. Conversations about spirituality, family histories and shared cultural backgrounds became the source material.Under the subtitle ANCESTRAL ROOTS, the themes of origin and identity will be explored musically and lyrically on all three evenings, with the invited artists once again bringing completely different experiences to the table than the curators. It is sure to be an exciting exchange in which the audience will also be invited to engage with it.Much of Kay Zhang's work begins with listening - outwardly and inwardly. The field that opens up remains enormous, she says, referring to all the different kinds of music she still hasn't discovered, yet: "I'm just on the surface, I think there's so much more to explore which I haven't still done", she says, "it takes a lifetime to be able to."