Jianbing Hu

Jianbing Hu has earned wide recognition for his artistry as a sheng soloist and composer. Visiting professor at the China Conservatory of Music and a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Project, he is a founder and the current president of the of Chinese Performing Arts Association of North America.
 
Jianbing Hu graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music in China and was part of the Central Chinese National Orchestra before moving to New York. Initially trained by his father, sheng performer Zhiguo Hu, Jianbing Hu made his debut as a soloist at age ten. Three years later he was admitted into the Music Art School of Gansu Province and won the prize of the Best Chinese Music Instrument Soloist in the regional Competition in Gansu.
 
Jianbing Hu has performed in the United States, France, Switzerland, Japan, and Korea at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, MOMA, Times Concert Hall, Symphony Space, Sanders Theatre and Jordan Hall in Boston, Chicago’s Symphony Hall, and China’s National Centre for the Performing Arts. As a soloist with orchestra, he has collaborated with the Seattle Symphony, and he joined the New York Philharmonic for the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the Silkroad Project. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut at the 2012 Chinese New Year concert.
 
Building on his belief that improvisation is the soul of Chinese folk music performance, Jianbing Hu dedicated his recent years to solo improvisation, as demonstrated in the impromptu solo album Jianbing Hu's Sky. In 2015, he presented an impromptu solo concert at the Northwest University for Nationalities in China. In 2018, he collaborated with harmonica master Howard Levy in Tennessee in a concert featuring a dialogue between the sheng and the harmonica.