Wang Hong

Wang Hong (Simplified Chinese: 汪 洪) is an uncredited Chinese composer and multi-instrumentalist who has collaborated with Benjamin Wynn and Jeremy Zuckerman playing several instruments on The Legend of Korra, which led the two composers to praise him as a "a Chinese orchestra" and as "a folk music dictionary". He also collaborated with Zuckerman and Wynn in the music of Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness which won the Daytimes Emmy Award 2012.

Early life
Wang graduated from Nanjing Normal University's Music Department where he mainly studied the, composition and studied the oboe at Nanjing Arts Academy. After graduating, he taught songwriting and oboe at the music department for about five years. Later, he changed his career to music editor at Jiangsu Province Institute of Arts where he studied for eight years on traditional songs and folk music. Later he moved to the United States where he's been living for more than twenty years.

Career as a composer
As a composer, he has composed several pieces for the Chinese ensemble and contemporary mixed bands which have earned him several awards for his compositions. His music is also published by China’s top music magazine Composition and Taiwan Publish Houses and has also recorded for several recording companies such as Sony Classical, Sega, TDK, Sound World and Water Baby Records. He is also a zhonghu soloist for the album Monk’s Moods which was nominated by Grammy’s Big band Award.

Career as a multi-instrumentalist
He has performed at many international music festivals in the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Poland, Belgium and the United States, with several renowned musicians such as Meredith Monk, Tan Dun and Zhao Jiping. He also performed with jazz musicians Max Roach, David Murray, Jong Jan and Anthony Brown’s Asian American Jazz Orchestra etc. in San Francisco Jazz Festival and Stone Grove Festival.

As a leading contemporary musician, he has played several concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area, such as the Thundering Across the Sky,   A Musical Dialogue with Dancing Lions , New Music Concert with the Citywinds, and Three Sound – An Experimental Music Series with computer music composer Carl Stone, sheng master Wu Wei, matouqin master Li Bo and bass clarinet/composer Gene Coleman. He toured with the Belgian music group Het Collectibet and the German group Ensemble Dragon in Belgium in 2010. His recent performances include Guo Wenjing's contemporary opera Feng Yi Ting at the Spoleto Festival 2012 in Charleston, S. Carolina and Lincoln Center, New York.

As a “musical archaeologist”, he has met with several folk master musicians in mainland China and learnt from them, for example, the  matouqin  (morin khuur; a horse head cello), on Inner Mongolia.

On September 14, 2014 he was at the 2014 Playfest in Málaga, Spain where he played the erhu, the zhonghu and the dizi on several compositions from The Legend of Korra and Avatar: The Last Airbender.