I am a former child prodigy painter who found lucidity in writing in present tense and Poiesis of Future in music-creating.  One way or the other I create -- an innate urgency and desire for aesthetic act that will never end. 

I am a postmodern child who harbors an unrequited love for Modernity  -- its unspoken sublimity and its wholesome form -- and meanwhile reckons the fragility of her own inconsistency, of the fragmented Contemporary, and of broken promises, mutilated Selfhood, the misunderstandings, the omnipresent present.

For the past 21 years my creative output has been identified as mostly sonic, musical.  Yet my music continues to reveal my past as a painter, or my passion for literature, for cinema, for dance, for the theatric, for spectacles, for fashion.  Or it started to sound like something visual or spatial, or is actually something visual and spatial.  The form deforms or happens, and I ask my audience to see, or to read, or to smell when they experience my music.  And at the end it’s all about something and nothing else, something and nothing other than music.  (Because our life is poetically fragmentary, our spaces exhilaratingly confusing.)

Of late I became at once transparent and opaque about an expression that is of flesh and bone, in a literal sense.  Embodiment is a loaded and vague term, and Branding false.  The reality is that the boundaries between my head, my heart, and my hormones and nervous system are illusory, and that the separation of the three is a fiction.  And I am breaking those boundaries and bringing to end that distance.  And what(how) I see, what(how) I hear, what(how) I think, and what(how) I present came together as a montage and a cosmic diorama of my fragmented yet interlaced truths, of the confusion of time and place, of the imageries dim or bright, of identities construed and broken.

So, here you would find my creations and/or presentations, in music, in words, in images, in combinations of the above.

Composer Mu-Xuan Lin (林慕萱) (Taiwan/USA) defines her life as a quest for an artistic autonomy poetically engendered by both its will and its vulnerability to one’s corporeal experience and to the world one lives in. Having had extensive training in the visual arts and creative writing and frequent exposure to theatre, dance, and literature from an early age, and profound influences from the cinema, Mu-Xuan is interested in the intrinsic kineses latent within any expressive matter which can be extracted, dissected, critiqued, and recreated in new artistic deliverances.

Described by the Los Angeles Times as “fascinating” and by the SRF2 kultur as “sonically sensuous,” her music has been heard worldwide, and on a SOOND (France) and an ein_klang (Austria) records. She is a guest-composer/faculty at the Novalis music+art Festival (Croatia) and the New Music on the Bluff festival (USA), the winner of the Protonwerk No.3 award (Switzerland) and Ensemble Adapter’s commission project “Adoptions 2017” (Germany), an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (France), an awardee of New Music USA, Max Kade, Mellon, Center for German and European Studies (DAAD program), FACE Croatia, Gardner Read, ASCAP grants, and multiple NCAF (國藝會，Taiwan) grants. Formerly, she has participated as a selected active fellow at various festivals and conferences such as the Summer Academy at Schloss Solitude (Germany), Darmstadt Summer Course (Germany), EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO’s Matrix15 (Germany), June in Buffalo (USA), Acanthes de Metz (France), Sävellyspaja (Finland), Ticino Musica (Switzerland), Delian Academy (Greece), and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts working with Master Artist Georg Friedrich Haas, a representative for KoFoMi (KomponistInnenforum Mittersill) and the residency in Salzburg (Austria). Her works have been featured at Festival AFEKT 2022 (Estonia), the Donaueschinger Musiktage – Next Generation konzert 2016 (Germany), Innovation Series 2017 (新點子樂展) – 30thAnniversary Edition of Taipei National Theater & Concert Hall (Taiwan), deciBels Festival 2020 (Latvia), the Piano Spheres Concert Series (Los Angeles), Mise-En Festival 2019 (New York), Hear Now Festival (Los Angeles), New Gallery Concert Series (Boston), Splice Festival (Missouri), and the 180º Festival (Bulgaria), and honorable mention/finalist of various competitions including the 2016 neuverBand’s and 2022 loadbang’s international commission competitions (honorable mention) and the 2015 Darmstadt Music Theatre Competition (semi-finalist).

She is working with ensemble 3peoplemusic (三個人，Taiwan) and loadbang (NYC) among others, and has worked with TAK Ensemble (USA), Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart (Germany), Ensemble Adapter (Germany), Ensemble SurPlus (Germany), Ensemble Proton Bern (Switzerland), Secession Orchestra (France), Avanti! Chamber Orchestra (Finland), Norrbotten NEO (Sweden), members of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra (Lapin Kamariorkesteri, Finland), Talujon Percussion Group, Radnofsky Quartet, Lydian Quartet, Dinosaur Annex, Transient Canvas, Urbanity Dance Project, percussionist Aiyun Huang, soprano Tony Arnold, pianist Vicki Ray, and flutist Shao-Wei Chou among many others.

Recently, in addition to composition, Mu-Xuan is venturing into the work of performing arts curation and dramaturge. In 2023, she co-founded Studio Nekton (宇宙微波) with flutist/performer Shao-Wei Chou for further developing collaborative projects involving programing, curation, and creations. She was the concept-curator, dramaturg, visual and stage designer of Taiwanese zheng artist Jing-Mu Kuo’s 2023 abstract-theatrical recital “Waterfalls” involving five new compositions (Taiwan), and is currently curating Studio Nekton’s 2024-25 multimodal program “Speak, Transparence” (France and Taiwan) featuring Shao-Wei Chou, storytelling artist Soma Yang, and herself (as composer-performer).

Mu-Xuan received her Bachelor of Music in Composition from the New England Conservatory, and MFA and Ph.D. in Music Composition and Theory from Brandeis University. She is currently enrolled in the Zürich University of the Arts’s (ZhdK) CAS Curating program under the direction of Dorothee Richter. Her primary instructors in composition include David Rakowski, Melinda Wagner, Yu-Hui Chang (張玉慧), Eric Chasalow, Michael Gandolfi, Larry Bell, and Ya-Ming Hsu (許雅民). She has also received instruction from Mark Andre, Oscar Bianchi, Chaya Czernowin, Francesco Filidei, Joshua Fineberg, Beat Furrer, Bernhard Gander, Georg Friedrich Haas, Stephen Hartke, Philippe Hurel, Louis Karchin, Fabien Lévy, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Hilda Paredes, Hèctor Parra, Rebecca Saunders, Dominique Schafer, Johannes Schöllhorn, Oscar Strasnoy, Hans Thomalla, and Jukka Tiensuu.

As a researcher, Mu-Xuan’s Ph.D. dissertation “On the Epistemological and the Methodological Approaches in the Analysis of Contemporary Music and a Synthesized Analysis of Fausto Romitelli’s La Sabbia del Tempo (1991) illuminates her interest in the epistemological aspects of artistic and musical creativity. Her 2023 article “The Erotic and the Melancholy of a Sincere Postmodern Identity – the cinematic spaces and a vulnerable time” will be published by Cambridge Scholars in the volume "Crossing into Distance: Contemporary Composers on the Present and Future of Art Music" in 2024. She is currently working on an interview with German sociologist Klaus Theweleit about his psychoanalytic works on right-wing fascism for the online E-journal OnCurating’s 2024 spring issue.

As a music educator, Mu-Xuan has previously taught at Brandeis University and California State University Long Beach, and had served as an Instructional Professor and a lecturer at the Hall-Musco Conservatory of Music at Chapman University.