Charles Kwong (b. 1985) is a composer from Hong Kong, currently based in Zurich. His work spans orchestral and instrumental music, compositions for cross-cultural ensembles, site-specific works, and transdisciplinary projects that extend beyond the traditional concert paradigm. As a performer, he often works with modular synthesisers and self-made instruments, engaging with physical touch, circuitry glitches, chaotic models, and feedback loops—exploring and experimenting with biomorphic qualities in sound and sonority.

Kwong’s music has been featured internationally at festivals such as Lucerne Forward, Ultraschall Berlin, the Takefu International Music Festival, Ticino Musica, the Festival International de Piano La Roque d’Anthéron, the Marvão International Music Festival, and ManiFeste, among other professional presentations. In recent years, he has received commissions from ensemble recherche, the Lucerne Festival, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Tai Kwun Contemporary, the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (HKNME), and the Hong Kong Arts Festival, among others. His works have been performed by renowned ensembles and musicians, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble intercontemporain, the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra Ensemble, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestra UniMi, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Divertimento Ensemble, Ensemble Offspring, Francesco Dillon, Mario Caroli, Jeanne-Marie Conquer, Tadashi Tajima, and Tosiya Suzuki.

Recent highlights of Kwong’s artistic career include a new orchestral work commissioned by the Lucerne Festival in 2025 to commemorate the 100th birthday of Pierre Boulez; Migrating Tracks, written for ensemble recherche’s collaborative project The New Recherche on the theme of gentrification; and Lullabies, an orchestral piece commissioned to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Hong Kong City Hall in 2022, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Edward Gardner. In 2016, the Ensemble intercontemporain performed Kwong’s sextet Lachrymae in their first-ever concert in Hong Kong.

Kwong served as Artistic Associate of the Hong Kong Sinfonietta from 2020 to 2022. In 2019, he co-founded PROJECT21st and has acted as one of its co-directors since. He has also played leading curatorial and creative roles in various site-specific and transdisciplinary projects in Hong Kong, including HKNME’s Our Audible City (2018–2019) and Lifelike (2021), as well as Tai Kwun Contemporary’s commissioned project Requiem (2020–2021). He was an artist-in-residence at Initiative Freie Musikszene Zürich in 2024, as well as at the Zurich University of the Arts and Tai Kwun Contemporary Artists’ Studio in 2020.

Born in Hong Kong in 1985, Kwong studied music at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and King’s College London before earning his doctorate in Composition from the University of York in 2013 under the supervision of Thomas Simaku. His artistic development has been shaped by mentorships with Toshio Hosokawa, Francesco Filidei, Mauro Lanza, and Oscar Bianchi, among others. Since 2018, he has been an affiliated faculty member at the University of Hong Kong’s Music Department, where he currently teaches postgraduate modules in composition and sound art. Since 2023, he has also been pursuing a programme in Transdisciplinary Studies at the Zurich University of the Arts as part of an artistic collective with his partner, Sharon Chan.