The Yang & Olivia Arts Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting cultural understanding and artistic vitality through chamber music performance, commissioning, and community engagement.
Rooted in a belief that music reflects the complexity of human experience and fosters connections across communities, the Foundation champions repertoire from a wide spectrum of cultures, traditions, and historical perspectives. Through thoughtfully curated programs, the Foundation amplifies underrepresented composers, supports cross-cultural dialogue, and creates meaningful experiences that resonate with diverse audiences.
The Foundation’s activities include commissioning new works, presenting programs in concert halls, libraries, and community venues, and partnering with schools and universities to advance music education and creative exchange. Its work highlights voices that have historically lacked visibility in the classical music canon, reinforcing music’s role as a vehicle for empathy, equity, and artistic exploration.
The Yang & Olivia Arts Foundation has received support from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, Mid-Atlantic Arts, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and other national and regional arts institutions. Through performance, education, and collaboration, the Foundation continues to advocate for a more inclusive, inspiring future for chamber music and the communities it serves.
Yang and Olivia is a proud recipient of the USArtist International Grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and is on the roster of the Performing Artist Discovery Program from the Western Arts Alliance. These honors recognize their efforts in cultural exchange via music.
Our program for 2025-2026: From Silence to Hysteria. This program bends time and expectation, inviting the listener into shifting textures and unexpected turns. Here, silence speaks, sound provokes, and hysteria emerges not as an ending, but as a transformation. Repertoire to be announced…
Yang and Olivia is the ensemble in residence for the OPUS Summer Chamber Music Camp in Naperville, IL. They will be working with kids 8-18 years old, lecturing, performing and teaching.
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In recent years, people are more aware of and embrace the diversity of races and genders. However, there are certain groups that are lost in diversity- the westerners residing in Asian countries. This presentation focuses on selected western composers who are established in Taiwan and Korea. Their compositions reflect interesting cultural influences combing musical elements of the East and West. While we acknowledge their musical contributions, their compositions will give the listeners a feast with many different flavors and spices.
This program explores composers’ creative depictions of storms, both in nature and within the emotional turmoils of their lives. Music serves as a powerful medium to artistically express the physical and psychological realms of human experience. Join us as we journey through the tempestuous and transformative power of musical storms.
is a theme we give to our 2022 outreach. Inspired by our own travels and by the influence of travel on musical styles, we present a program that includes works by a Taiwanese female composer who incorporates ethnic children’s folk songs in her music, an American composer who incorporates Cuban dance music, and ancient Chinese folk tunes arranged for western instruments during a dark time in China when anything western was banned. You will even hear the story of how Mozart traveled hundreds of miles to advance his career and how that effort came to a disappointing end.
We are fortunate to live in an era where the music of all the cultures of the world is easily accessible and musicians are able to draw upon this diversity of cultures. Though music can “travel” more quickly these days, over the course of history, as people traveled thousands of miles to trade between the west and the east for goods such as produce, spices, gold, leather… etc., music traveled along with them. This program showcases the richness and complexities of different music styles and the stories behind them. .
Award-Winning violin and piano duo Yang and Olivia present a soul-searching program, opening with Returning Soul by Shi-Hui Chen, based on a Taiwanese indigenous tribe’s legends, followed by Chihchun Chi-sun Lee’s Isolation and Hysteria, reflecting the soul’s agony during the Covid lockdowns. Other pieces include Cantiga by Grammy-Award nominee Dmitri Cervo, and Double Play by Michael Sidney Timpson.
In 2019, Yang and Olivia foundation gives a fundraising concert for VanderCook College of Music, promoting music education in greater Chicago area. Primary goals include fostering a deeper connection between Illinois Tech, VCM, Bridgeport, and Chinatown, raising awareness for VCM and Illinois Tech within the surrounding communities, and engaging any number of organizations in the process. The concert also aims to raise funds for the refurbish of the performance space colloquially known as the “New Building,” a massive financial undertaking with spectacularly ambitious results. The refurbished space will serve as a performance area that will allow VanderCook to host concerts in a space very close to home.
Our event highlight in 2018 includes a chamber music concert by Momento Virtuosi, a dynamic ensemble of 10 members from 6 different countries featuring programs of diverse instrumentations. This performance is part of the Qingdao West Coast International Music Festival, co-promoted by Qingdao Miao Haiyun Harmony Road Cultural Exchange Co., Ltd. For information on Momento Virtuosi, check out Momento Virtuosi
Our theme for 2026-2027 is Not Alone: Music, Mental Health, and the Human Story, a series of live music performances and community engagement activities centered on works by composers who experienced mental and emotional struggles. By pairing music with the human stories behind it, the project invites audiences to reflect on shared vulnerability and the ways music can offer comfort, connection, and understanding. Programs feature thoughtfully curated repertoire presented alongside contextual storytelling and facilitated dialogue, highlighting how composers transformed personal adversity into artistic expression. These narratives help audiences recognize that struggle is a common human experience and that music can resonate deeply across time and culture.