With a visual and musical style that mixes ancient and modern - Steppes chic meets urban cool - Mongolian born Sa Dingding has become one of China's best-known artists. Now, she is setting her sights on the West, she tells Clifford Coonan
CHINESE music has long struggled to win listeners outside of Greater China, but Sa Dingding, who has been variously called the Chinese Kate Bush or the Mongolian Björk, is determined to change that.
We meet in her studio in Beijing. She is wearing large pompom earrings and is incredibly self-assured, carefully made-up atop her exquisite ethnic flowing dresses, a stunning combination of Steppes chic and urban cool, with a strong New Age element that should go down well with the Buddha Lounge chill-out fans.
Her voice is what sets her apart from the rest of the new-age genre. It is truly remarkable - otherworldly but groovy - and she is being widely touted as the talent that will bridge that yawning cultural chasm between "East" and "West".
"My reputation built up because of the music," she says. "Westerners are interested in Chinese culture, and they can learn more about this through my music. My music is quite different, expressing both very modern and ancient Oriental culture. The combination of these two aspects is why I think it is interesting to contemporary audiences."
Raised a nomad with sheep and cows in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, Sa was signed by a scout to Universal, and Alive(or The Life of 10,000 Things, as it is known in China) has sold two million legitimate copies here. Who knows how many pirated copies are in circulation?
Since winning a BBC3 World Music Award in the Asia/Pacific category in April, she has been touring tirelessly to promote her blend of Western electronica, Chinese singing and Buddhist chants. Even the lyrics are unlike anyone else's, sung not just in her own invented language but also in Chinese, Sanskrit and Tibetan.
She has her sights set firmly on the West now. She will headline at the Festival of World Cultures in Dún Laoghaire on August 24th, and is enthusiastic about the music of Ireland, citing U2 and the Cranberries as among her idols.
"I'm particularly pleased to perform in Ireland," she says. "Performance is a very important part of my musical world, and it's a shame if you only listen to the CD without seeing the performance," she says.
"I don't think there is that much difference between people in the United States, or Japan or Ireland or elsewhere. They are just different groups of people. I think peoples' emotion and sentiment is the same. I hope more people can hear my music, no matter they are Americans or Irish, or people from other countries. I very much look forward to communicating with them."
"I listen to a lot of Western musicians because they are not afraid to show their individuality. They express themselves openly and publicly, particularly contemporary Western music. But I also like Asian music for its subtlety."
Sa is no mainstream artist - her music bears little resemblance to the bubblegum popcurrently so popular in China - but she has a healthy fan base and inspires intense devotion in her fans, who write novels and make sculptures in her honour.
Sa has a kind of muse role in China, where there is a growing interest in the spiritual among those tired of the relentless "capitalism with Chinese characteristics". Her music inspired the writer Cai Jun to pen a novel, Tian Ji, which sold in its millions. "I am the heroine," Sa explains. "The novel uses my real name and some of my true stories."
She also collaborated with the French producer Deep Forest to produce a song in English and in a self-created language to express her grief and encouragement to the victims of last May's Sichuan earthquake.
"I realised I wanted to be a singer when I was very small. From the age of three until the age of six, I grew up in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. During these days in the grasslands, I believed music should be very free. And everyone can become an artist," she says. In keeping with these somewhat esoteric sentiments, Sa studied music and philosophy and plays the zither and the horse-head fiddle, and always travels with her Buddhist thangka (a kind of painted or embroidered Buddhist banner).
She is currently preparing her new album which she hopes will be released at the end of the year. "The Chinese music market needs to be guided by a large number of musicians and needs to be more diverse. Young musicians face the task of convincing fans to like more than just mainstream music, showing that other forms of Chinese music have great power," she says.
As well as doing publicity in Europe and the US, she is planning a major showcase in Beijing - where she now lives with her Mongolian doctor mother and Han Chinese government official father - during the Olympics.
"I am very interested in both modern and ancient music. Initially, the two did not intersect but developed separately, until one day I found that the two could quite naturally combine. Only this combination can represent the whole me," she said.
There was controversy earlier this year when she said she completely supported Beijing's policy on Tibet following the brutal crackdown on anti-Chinese protests in the Himalayan enclave, espousing the widely held belief in China that Tibet was, is and always will be Chinese. Richard Gere is unlikely to be buying any of her records.
Despite her pro-Beijing line on Tibet, she remains a fan of Icelandic warbler Björk, who angered the Chinese government by singing pro-Tibetan independence lyrics during a show in Shanghai shortly before the riots in Lhasa.
"I like Björk's music very much. I think that when a new concept emerges, people will make comparisons with something already out there, and I'm okay with that.
"The most important thing is that, as time passes, people see Sa Dingding's performances, then they can understand Sa Dingding's music better. This process takes time."
Sa Dingding headlines the Festival of World Cultures Dún Laoghaire, Pavilion Theatre, on Sunday August 24 at 8pm.
For more, see www.sadingding.co.uk
An A to Z of Chinese music
Ais for Anita Mui, "the Chinese Madonna" for her song Bad Girla decade ago, spawning a generation of similar soubriquets.
Bis for boybands. The Chinese love 'em - and no wonder. Nobody can pout like a Chinese boyband can; check out the online video from C-pop foursome Fire.
Cis for control. The Chinese have been aware of music's potential as an instrument of social "organisation" ever since Confucius, who put forward the idea of orthodox ritual music as a kind of mass soporific - without ever having heard of boybands.
D is for the daddyof Chinese rock. When Cui Jian first performed the Chinese rock song Yi Wu Suo You( I Have Nothing) in the 1980s, it was the first time an electric guitar was used in China.
E is for easy listening, which Chinese music usually isn't. Especially when it's karaoke.
F is for Fahrenheit, the Chinese boy band du jour - whose publicity wheeze is to market each of its four members as a season. Calvin is spring, Jiro is summer, Wu is autumn and Arron is winter. They ought to record What's Another Year?
G is for gongs. You can't really do Chinese music without them.
H is for hip-hop. The Chinese haven't really got the hang of this genre yet, if the lyric from Dragon Sun Squad is anything to go by: "I love hip-hop" it runs, "just like I love my mum and dad."
Iis for intervals. If you can play a minor third and a major sixth - preferably on a gong - you can play Chinese.
Jis for J-pop: the Japanese version of C-pop.
Kis for Kung Foo Fighting. The original Carl Douglas kind from his immortal 1974 disco classic, that is: not the many pale imitations which range from a Fatboy Slim remix to the watered-down travesty at the end of the movie Kung Fu Panda.
Lis for Lollipop. Not only do they look and sound like a boy band, they also live together in an apartment paid for by their record company.
Mis for mandopop. That's music sung in Mandarin, as opposed to music sung in Cantonese (cantopop). Canto artists tend to go mando, but not vice versa because it's harder for a native Mandarin speaker to learn Cantonese than the other way round.
Nis for names. Chinese names are incredibly complicated and often, to Western eyes and ears, unintentionally hilarious. Take the divette known as Fish Leong. Leong Chui Peng chose the moniker, she explains, because the last syllable in her name sounds like "fish".
Ois for Chinese opera, a mind-numbing onslaught on the senses in which inexplicably entangled plots are allied to unbearably repetitive noise and the whole thing goes on for ever. Of course, many would say the same about Verdi.
Pis for piracy, which is even bigger in China than bubble gum. Pirated CDs are sold in "legitimate" record shops, and the trade is said to represent a whopping 95 per cent of sales.
Qis for queasy, which is any sane person would feel, faced with the realities of the Chinese commercial music scene. (See under: P)
Ris for . . . dammit, there aren't any 'R's in Chinese.
Sis for Sober, aka the Chinese Oasis.
Tis for Tuvan throat singers, who can sing two lines of music at once. But then, after a few scoops, can't we all?
Uis for the unexpected, which is what we should expect from Chinese musicians over the next few years.
Vis for vastness. When Chinese musicians finally do make it on to Western cultural radar, be prepared for a major takeover.
Wis for wit. Which, despite pious pronouncements, is something the Chinese do pretty well. As in the delightful YouTube clip of the two students lip-synching to Backstreet Boys' I Want It That Way.
Xis for Xun, a kind of globular flute, a 7,000-year-old example of which was unearthed in China recently. No, it's not a typo. Seven thousand years. That's how old Chinese culture is.
Yis for Yungchen Llamo, the feisty Tibetan a cappella singer who also performs at the forthcoming Festival of World Cultures. Unlike Sa Dingding, however, Yungchen isn't a fan of Chinese policy on Tibet.
Zis for zheng, the Chinese 25-stringed zither. If - like Sa Dingding - you can play one of those, does that make you a zheng-ius? OK, enough already.
