The Marriage Between Climate and Art
A few days ago, I came across this quote by Oscar Wilde: “It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. … Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” And I feared my literary and musical compositions would be a mere mimicry, as I often quoted the great masters. So I asked my friend, “To what degree of originality frees me from being a mimic?” And she replied, “Maybe until someone else quotes you.”
To my surprise, I was quoted by the Stanford Daily last October after the closing concert of Stanford Climate Week (SCW)—a humbling moment that made me pause and wonder whether this, finally, is a small step towards finding one’s own voice. I directed this performance, which featured music led by Sean Tan '27 and improv dancers led by Eddie Chen '28. The idea of a climate concert originated in spring 2025, when the SCW organizers had just finished their inaugural week and were planning the second iteration of the event for fall quarter. Hoping to expand beyond the students already enthusiastic about climate, we wanted to experiment with event forms beyond keynotes and mixers and embody Stanford’s interdisciplinarity, especially preserving the luster of the humanities from the flood of technology.
Over the summer, I called my friend Sean Tan, founder and director of Ensemble OH?, whose many members I’m friends with and have performed with. The ensemble aspires to create art and music that makes people go “oh?”. Their quarterly concert is dedicated to performing and commissioning a student work and incorporates an overarching theme, a message that inspires. We quickly agreed that Ensemble OH? × Stanford Climate Week is a wonderful collaboration, serving a dual purpose as both the ensemble’s fall 2025 concert and the climate week’s closing ceremony. Thus, the performance is conceived, along with the subtitle When the World Breathes Again.
Climate and music are my two unequivocal passions; however, to many, bridging them might need some convincing. Hence, I delivered an opening address for the concert, and I’ve decided to publish it below. (The script has been lightly edited.)
This year’s Stanford Climate Week theme is “Pathways to Impact”, where science, technology, business, finance, and policy meet under ONE shared purpose: our planet’s future and our future.
I think we are missing a pathway… Music, dance, and all of the arts.
Steve Jobs once said, “Technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.” And tonight, that’s what we celebrate—the marriage between climate and art.
Numbers are cold, but art is warm. Through art, we feel emotions—the agony from disasters, the hope for recovery. Through art, we unite on this Pathway to Impact.
I am both a science student and a music student. Science tells us what is happening; Art reminds us why it matters.
Without music and the arts, my Stanford career would be incomplete, my life would be incomplete. Music gave me my soul, a language to empathize and to emote.
Art is as old as humanity, it’s in our genes: Cave drawings, bamboo flutes, calfskin drums, singing and dancing around a fire pit.
Tonight we will first take you to the abyss, unleashing the horrors of climate change; then we will strive towards hope and a better future, when the world breathes again.
The program will start with my composition, La fin de ce monde. It is a cautionary tale: The unsustainable human development led to the eventual destruction of humankind from the wrath of Nature. In the end, the Earth thrives, but this time without humans. It is not the Earth that we need to save, but ourselves. The Earth has recovered from five mass extinctions, but we might be the victims of the sixth.
