TD Encounters: Transoceanic

January 19, 2026
7:30pm
Hugh’s Room (296 Broadview Ave, Toronto, ON M4M 2G7)

Curated by Haotian Yu,* Transoceanic traces intersections between technology and diasporic experience. In this Encounters, works from diasporic composers Corie Rose Soumah, Kotoka Suzuki, and Anthony Tan reimagine sound and light through science-fiction visions that decenter Eurocentric narratives of progress.

Cultural perceptions continue to position artists as preservers of tradition, and artists of the Global North as the source of innovation. Diasporic artists, entangled with the global flow of technology and resources, challenge this divide. Like technology, diaspora is both geographically fluid and regional – flowing everywhere, yet still carrying the culturally specific traces of places it has lived.

Soumah’s Limpidités VI layers saxophones, cowrie shells, and electronics into a sonic archaeology of the Black Atlantic. Tan’s Horizontal and Vertical Forces reimagines virtuosity through complex electronic sound, pushing listening itself into overdrive and reappropriating labour and excess as stereotypes of the Asian performing body. Suzuki’s Delicate Anticipation repurposes electric lighting to cast delicate silhouettes, drawing on Japanese aesthetics of shadow to question Western ideals of dominating light and progress.

A discussion and audience Q&A with Yu will follow the performance.

_{*Haotian Yu is the winner of the 2025/26 Soundstreams New Voices Curator Mentorship Program for the Encounters Series.}

*Soundstreams’ TD Encounters is a free event series which always offers something different. These events are equal parts performance, artist discussion, and Q&A, and give audiences the opportunity to engage with artists and their work in an intimate and relaxed setting.