Wang Wei

Bay Area artist Wang Wei has been a student of music since his early childhood. As early as 1973, his father began to teach him to play the yangqin, a traditional Chinese hammered dulcimer. Wei continued his music studies throughout secondary school at the Music Conservatory of China in Beijing where he practiced under the tutiledge of some of China’s best yangqin and precussion teachers.

In 1989, Wei enrolled at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. He continued to study traditional instruments and also became increasingly interested in Western classical music. Upon graduation from the Conservatory in 1993, Wei joined a Chinese pop ensemble and began to perform and to record in Shanghai. A year later he collaborated with musicians from Germany, inner Mongolia, Nanjing, Chengdu and Hang Zhou to create an East-West fusion ensemble called Crossing. The group won first place at the 1994 Beijing Jazz competition.

A Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) scholarship in 1996 enabled Wei to move to Berlin where he continued his musical studies. While in Berlin, Wei helped form a trio called Omen, which primarily played Chinese music on sheng (a mouth-blown reed instrument), piano and precussion. In October of that year, Omen was awarded first place at Berlin’s prestigious World Music competition. After completeing his two-year DAAD scholarship, Wei joined the jazz program at Berlin’s Hochschule Für Musik Hanns Eisler. Here, he studied a variety of different musical types including piano, pop and Latin music as well as world and African percussion. Today, Wei performs as part of San Francisco’s Door Dog Music Productions.