Lim Giong
Lim Giong is a musician, artist, DJ, composer, songwriter, music producer, and also an actor. He is a leading figure on the Taiwanese experimental electronic music scene.
His music career began with the release of his first album Marching Forward in 1990. He was one of the leading musicians in the New Taiwanese Song Movement; many of his earlier songs were in Taiwanese Hokkien and often reflected political issues and social criticism. Starting from his third album Entertainment World, recorded in England in 1993, his compositions became increasingly infused with electronic music, evolving drum and bass, break beat, ambient and electronica, creating more experimental and freestyle works.
Lim introduced Taiwanese notes into pop-rock culture, and weaves complex musical fabrics. In his works, the traditional meets the modern to create a world of his own; his albums China Fun (2002) and Folk Paradise (2003) are successful fusions of traditional and electronic music.
His album Insects Awaken (2005), which applied the concept of “stereo picture” or “3D sound picture”, was first released in Europe on the major French label MK2. The 2005 Cannes Film Festival invited Lim to perform the music at an outdoor event with animated video of images of Taiwan with elements of the National Palace Museum’s collections. The album was later released in Taiwan and won the best crossover album of the 17th Golden Melody Awards in 2006.
He produced a 90-second commercial, Old is New, for the National Palace Museum’s 80th Anniversary, which received the Golden Medal of the American Alliance of Museums’ Muse Award in 2006.
Lim was often a leading actor in the internationally renowned director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s early movies. Stimulated by the world of cinema, he started to compose and produce music for movies, including award-winning Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004), Still Life (2006), Useless (2007), and Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), Millennium Mambo (2001), and The Assassin (2015), which won the 2015 Cannes Film Festival’s Soundtrack Award.
In 2016, commissioned by Cloud Gate 2, Lim collaborated for the first time with a choreographer and composed music for Cheng Tsung-lung’s dance production, 13 Tongues,which premiered at the National Theater of the National Performing Arts Center in Taipei as part of the Taiwan International Festival of Arts.
Lim composed the music for Full Moon, part of the double bill Orb, 29 April – 27 May in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.