As part of AGMA’s AAPI Heritage Month campaign, AGMA Communications Coordinator interviewed Chuanyuan Liu about his journey from studying computer science after immigrating from China to becoming an opera singer whose work explores identity, belonging, and home. Liu reflected on how he has embraced both his Chinese and American experiences through performance, creating projects centered on Asian identity, language, and queer visibility.
AGMA Soloist Chuanyuan Liu was 18 when he moved from China to the United States to study computer science, a practical, stable path that made sense to him and his parents. But during his second semester at the University of Virginia (UVA), he joined the University Singers, and everything changed when he performed Bach’s St. John Passion for the first time; he was mesmerized and fell in love with classical music. Voice lessons followed along with a change in his major, and he discovered centuries of repertoire waiting to be explored and performed.
As his artistry grew, Liu found himself navigating something more personal. As one of the few Asian students in the UVA music program, he found himself assimilating, leaning into American culture rather than embracing the fullness of his identity. According to Liu, he was actively choosing to shy away from the first 18 years of his life…the language, the traditions, the music he grew up with in China.
The turning point came during his master’s program at Bard College, where he collaborated with two classmates on a concert called neither here nor there, a three-part project built around denial, acceptance, and celebration, tracing what it feels like to exist between two cultures without fully belonging to either. For Liu, performing it was a personal reckoning. As he moved through each act, he found himself moving through his own life story. It was the first time he sang Chinese art songs, and the first time both halves of himself shared the same stage.
“Just because I learned everything about classical music in America doesn’t mean that’s the only bubble I live in,” Liu says. “The last time I went back home was 2019, and this work became a way to hold on to the idea of home and to weave together my experience in China and my life in the States, because everything I’ve lived through shapes who I am today. Even with the nostalgic themes I explore, there’s always the lens of having now been in America for over ten years, and the beauty of bringing two very different cultures together is something I find deeply meaningful.”
He subsequently committed to pursuing at least one Asian-related project every season of his career. The next work that left a deep mark was Call Me By My Name, a recital built around the simple but profound frustration of being perpetually last in introductions because no one wanted to attempt to pronounce his given name. Liu’s name, Chuanyuan, means “the source of the river,” and Tongyao’s, his collaborator and pianist, means “childhood songs.” Together, they wove a program of water music and folk tunes that illuminated how much meaning lives within a name, and how much is lost when people are pressured to water themselves down for the comfort of others.
This summer, Liu will take his self-exploration further with Wear Yellow Proudly’s Memoirs of a Gaysian, to be performed at the Philly Pride Arts Festival alongside Spencer Britten and Jeremy Chan. The concert sits at the intersection of his identities as a gay Asian man, another dimension of a self that refuses to be flattened into a single story.
Threaded through all of his experiences is an evolving definition of “home.” For most of his life, home was straightforward. It was one city, one family, one country. But after over a decade in the United States, meeting and marrying his husband, and building a career that takes him across the country and beyond, home has become something more fluid. And nowhere feels more home for Liu than in performance. He describes the bonds forged in a production as a kind of recurring miracle — the intense, temporary family that forms in rehearsal rooms and backstage corridors.
“Now I’m turning 29, and soon I’ll have lived in the States as long as I lived in China. This home is something I actively chose. It’s where I’m building my life. But that doesn’t erase the fact that a big part of home will always be in China. As a traveling musician, I’ve come to understand that home is more about people than location.”
For Chuanyuan Liu, the stage is not just where he works. It is where all the displacement, the discovery, and the belonging finds its fullest expression. He spent a long time feeling like he belonged fully to neither China nor America, to neither identity nor the other. And from that tension, he drew the most honest kind of art.