ABSTRACT
This chapter provides background about Liang and his musical development, connecting his impulse to create Shanghai Restoration Project to questions of diasporic attachment and Asian American musical belonging. It analyzes the particular inspiration he finds in Shanghai jazz, a musical form rooted in colonial entanglement and interracial admixture, arguing that it captures Dave Liang's desire to find rootedness in places of flux, discrepant fluencies, and creativity. Dave Liang, the artist and producer who records as Shanghai Restoration Project, remixes bits and samples of Chinese traditional instruments onto beat-driven, electronic soundscapes that create contexts for hearing those sounds. Moreover, in mining questions of diasporic identification, Chinese Americans can be equally complicit in reproducing class-inflected, romanticized visions of Chineseness, rendering global cities like Shanghai as cosmopolitan wonderlands of East/West hybridity set to an ambient soundtrack of techno-cool. While Liang aims to destabilize categories through his music, the ways in which listeners engage with his music speak to their own interests and desires.
