The Chatham Arts Council is investing in artists through our Meet This Artist series, introducing you to Chatham County artists each year in a big way. So, take a look. Meet your very inspiring neighbor.
Guest writer Dolly R. Sickles penned this very special Meet This Artist interview. Dolly is creative writer, graphic artist, photographer, PR and marketing guru, grantwriter, and social advocate. She was one of Chatham’s 2026 Artist Support Grant recipients and is here interviewing one her fellow grantees!
Our Meet This Artist feature is made possible with support from the team at VRC, Ltd.
Connective Threads with Clara Young
By Dolly R. Sickles
You never know what kind of folks you’ll encounter in Chatham County, with its verdant fields, thriving arts scene, growing population … and the renaissance woman living across the street.
The renaissance woman you didn’t see coming is Clara Yang, Chinese-American pianist, composer, interdisciplinary artist, and head of keyboard studies at UNC. She’s a 2026 Artist’s Support Grant recipient in the regional partnership funded by NC Arts Council and led by United Arts Wake with Chatham Arts Council, for her project to support the recording of her new solo recording project, xmachina.
Clara Yang
Dr. Clara Yang was born in Tianjin, China and immigrated with her family to the Bay area in California when she was 13. She went to University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, and then later to Yale and to Eastman. She’d never been to North Carolina before relocating here in 2011 for her work at UNC, though she’d heard good things and had gotten her job before graduating with her doctoral degree. She met her husband at UNC, when he was a postdoc in particle physics and took the “NS bus” with her. Don’t you wonder how many connections have been made on the Chapel-Hill Transit?
Nowadays, they make their home in northern Chatham County, where they’re raising their four-year-old daughter who is just getting interested in piano, but will soon take lessons from someone else. “She’s taking group music lessons right now, but we’re thinking of starting her soon on beginner lessons. I cannot teach her myself because she doesn’t listen to me at all,” Clara says, laughing.
“I love living in Chatham County because it’s really beautiful and there’s so much nature. I’ve met a lot of really great people in my neighborhood; people are very friendly and it’s close to UNC.”
“Playing piano is always part of my life,” she says, “but without piano I would love to take a walk outside if it’s a sunny day. I listen to classical music a lot, obviously, but I also like listening to my cousin’s music – Yvette Young. She plays electric guitar, rock-style. I like jazz, and some popular people, like Laufey.” She counts among her influences her piano teachers: renowned piano pedagogue Claude Frank, Nelita True, John Perry, and Hans Boepple.
Clara and family love trying new restaurants, and frequent Korean BBQ or hot pot spots. “In Cary there are so many nice restaurants now. After my last recital on Sunday, I brought my daughter and we went to a restaurant and got ice cream … she now associates concerts with parties.”
As a young pianist, Clara studied and performed some of the most difficult piano repertoire during her years in high school. “Many years later, as I have revisited some of these pieces to perform for concerts, I have a very different perspective and understanding from years of performance and teaching experience.”
EX MACHINA
To understand the artist Clara Young, we’ve first got to understand her ongoing multidisciplinary music project, EX MACHINA, which premiered at UNC in 2024, progressed to an “improved version” in March 2025, and will further evolve to its recording, xmachina, which will release from Bright Shiny Things on May 1.
According to Encyclopedia Brittanica, “deus ex machina is a person or thing that appears or is introduced into a situation suddenly and unexpectedly and provides an artificial or contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty.” It’s a literary device that’s been around since the times of ancient Greek theatre and is a Latin term meaning ‘god from the machine.’ In popular culture, you’d be familiar with ex machina in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, when Frederic undergoes a miraculous change of heart after meeting a religious man offstage at the end of Act V; or perhaps when Ralph in Lord of the Flies is being hunted and a naval officer suddenly arrives on the island and stops the hunt. ‘Ex machina’ doesn’t have to relate to anything supernatural, rather it comes from an outside force.
For Clara, the ex machina might be the art and performance beyond the piano she’s been playing since she was three-and-a-half, and in which she currently finds herself fully immersed. It’s also the ongoing multimedia and cross-genre project that involves immersive visual art and commissioned works. This is no lighthearted romp through Vivaldi’s Spring … this is an intense and technical, intellectual, emotional, and powerful experience. “I am a musician for sure,” she says, “but I create artistic ideas.” She’s a concert pianist who normally performs the core canon of piano repertoire, but this interdisciplinary project enables (and encourages) Clara to work with people outside her field in ways beyond just pieces for piano. “EX MACHINA explores the changing connection and relationship between humanity and technology.” Clara is the disruptor in her pattern; she is the ex machina.
“I love discovering new ways of expressions artistically and collaborating with others. These innovative artists open up my world and inspire me to create new ideas for projects.”
According to Clara’s site, “EX MACHINA is a multimedia project exploring the evolving relationship between humanity and technology through immersive visual art and music. Centered around the piano—a machine of sound and expression—it reflects on how technology shapes both artistic experience and human identity. The project invites audiences to rethink the boundaries between human and machine, using music to explore the machine as both an artistic medium and a philosophical idea.”
The project started a couple years ago, to right before the pandemic and Clara asked a few composers at UNC to write some pieces for her. “I had a rough idea of technology, but it didn’t really translate into anything – just basically a general theme. I just wanted to perform their pieces in a traditional recital at UNC. And then … then the pandemic shut down everything.”
She didn’t play that concert, and those pieces just sat there. And then she gave birth to her daughter. “And I kind of, like, pushed everything off my shelf for a while, obviously. I started to do a different project on women composers with a violinist friend of mine, and after that completed, I just thought ‘oh my goodness, these pieces are still sitting on my piano.’ What am I gonna do? Everything had been dragged on much longer than I thought, and I really wanted to make more out of this.”
“So I started to think about how I could connect things more, if that makes sense.”
She started to sketch out in her mind how she could break some boundaries and do something new. “During the pandemic we all had so much time on our hands and it was compounded by the fact that I was pregnant, and gave birth, and it made me rethink a lot of things. I was obviously influenced by my friends and my colleagues who were doing really interesting work, but more importantly I felt that I had this urge at the time to do something, so I felt alive … I wanted to still feel like I’m connected to creativity. Like, maybe it was really just a result of being cooped up at home, you know?”
What started as small improvisations for Clara and her family, posted on Instagram, garnered attention and enjoyment from community and eventually blossomed into collaborations online during the pandemic. “And that got me started thinking, you know, about how I can bring all of these composers [together] like the existing pieces written for me already, to bring everybody together,” said Clara. “I just really wanted to work with people, because I longed for doing stuff with others at the time—there was so much time alone.”
Improvisation led to collaboration, which in turn led to thinking about performance and recital in more than the fixed formats they’d always been perceived. “And this idea started with trying something new and then just kind of blossomed into something I didn’t realize it might be.”
This project became the ex machina. So she got in touch with her visual artist friend, Xuan, who she hadn’t chatted with in years. “I told her, ‘I’m not a visual artist,’ but I’ve seen her work before and just remembered being really amazed’.” Clara and Xuan were classmates at Eastman, studying piano under the same teacher before Xuan changed her profession later to become a well-known visual and new media artist. “That’s another thing I’m so happy about,” said Clara, “because of the project she and I got reconnected.”
“I organized a conference at UNC in 2024, Festival on the Hill, that involved an interdisciplinary panel of all kinds of people, including one of my former students who’s been at Google as an engineer for a long time,” she said. “And he still plays piano brilliantly, you know. And the panel involved philosophy, psychology, people from different departments to chat about how AI technology would influence the musical and artistic world. So not only had the idea of this project evolved for something for myself, but it became a community in some ways for many people – that was the world premiere of EX MACHINA.”
The first day of Festival on the Hill was a panel at Hyde Hall Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC. The second day was the composers talking about The Making of EX MACHINA. And the third day was the show with a reception. And the project has continued to evolve into its multidisciplinary mixed media iteration with music and visuals, and of course the recording, xmachina.
Since its debut, it’s garnered national attention. Baryshnikov Arts selected Clara as one of its residence artists, along with her juggernaut interdisciplinary project with visual artist Xuan. The multimedia performance through Baryshnikov Arts “explores the evolving relationship between humanity and technology. This program highlights the work of contemporary American composers such as Reena Esmail, Christopher Cerrone, and Phillip Glass and is combined with Xuan’s visual commentary to create an immersive theatrical experience that invites audiences to rethink the boundaries between human and machine.” It also notes that EX MACHINA was developed in part during a Baryshnikov Arts Residency.
“Mr. Baryshnikov himself was there and he loved it,” says Clara. “So they chose this project to be presented by Baryshnikov Arts on May 11, as an album release concert, and part of the Carnegie Hall United in Sound America 250 Festival. Also notable—this semester, Clara is fellow at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH) at UNC with the project.
xmachina
Clara’s 2026 Artist Support Grant is in support of recording xmachina through Bright Shiny Things, a well-known label in New York. This will be her fifth album, and the first outside the UNC ecosystem.
“For the original project, there were nine commissioned works,” she says, “but on the CD I’m including seven commissioned works written for EX MACHINA, in particular, and three existing works. I’m playing Philip Glass – I haven’t been talking to him even though I performed with him once, so I’m playing the piece that I played with him. Two of the other works are by Rina Esmail and Christopher Cerrone, who is a good friend of mine.”
Nebula is an original composition, and she composed the piano part for hip-hop artist/beat maker Suzi Analogue in their cross-genre piece, Deep Condition Redux.
“I enjoy improvising, but this is the first time I actually have my own works on a commercial album. I’m a concert pianist, so what I do normally is perform the core canon of the piano repertoire,” she says. “I’m currently playing a recital of Chopin, Liszt, Schumann. I play concertos with the North Carolina Symphony and chamber music.” She’s also played at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, the National Auditorium of Music in Madrid, the Seymour Centre in Sydney, and the Kodak Hall at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester.
“But in addition to the normal activities of a professional pianist, I enjoy working with composers and people outside my field. The project EX MACHINA explores the changing relationship and connection between humanity and technology. I left the prompt quite broad and open for the composers.”
No single person tipped Clara over from traditional pianist to interdisciplinary artist. “I do have a lot of very, very innovative friends and colleagues,” she says. “Some of them are so creative, you know, and when I see their performances or projects, I feel like, wow, that really resonates with me.”
“The project grew from that – from having the commissions to a festival, and I participated in some other talks with interdisciplinary people from different departments about the influence of AI. I’m not an AI expert, but it’s interesting and I think they enjoy hearing what I have to say about how music is evolving and what my prediction is, and what impact I think AI would have on music and a musician’s life.”
“My project itself is not just about AI, although it is part of it, but it’s not about any technology. Like, piano is a technology basically; it’s an instrument. A machine. So it’s like literally from the machine.”
Clara sees herself as an interpreter, who’s influenced by a lot of the composers themselves. “I’m a pianist, and when the perform or when they write music for me I have to interpret it. It’s not just playing notes. I have to bring life into the music and through the notes to complete the piece. Sometime it’s interesting that relationship is interesting between the composer and the performer because I might see something they didn’t intend.
“That’s the beauty of it—if I simply do what they want me to do, then it’s not art anymore. A good composer usually allows you to see where you would bring the music, how you would think of it. For EX MACHINA, they left me with a lot of freedom so I could make it my own.”
For more information:
- EX MACHINA project site
- xmachina recording
- Carnegie Hall United in Sound America concert
- Baryshnikov Arts Performance
- EX MACHINA Program Notes
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