Since the establishment of a Western musical education by the Japanese in the late nineteenth century,  most Taiwanese composers were trained in this method and pursued further studies in the West. Consequently, they were cut off from their own tradition, which sooner or later led to a questioning of their own cultural and artistic identity.
The long, slow process of the search for identity is linked to the historical complexity of Taiwan and is ultimately found through recurring elements in the compositional process  - composition, decomposition, recomposition, codification, decodification, re-codification.
Miao Wang-Wen trained in France with Yoshihisa Taira, Jean Schwarz, and Gerard Grisey at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris and at IRCAM.  She was awarded the Prix Bourges as well as commissions from the Festival de Radio France.  Her approach is representative of the question of musical identity through her studies of traditional Taoist theory of the I Ching, reworked to construct musical parameters throughout her compositions.  Following the same theory,  the philosophical use of the I Ching directly corresponds to her spiritual listening. On the occasion of this conference, we propose an analysis which envisages a discovery of the I Ching system whose structure is put in service of musical composition and whose content deepens the imagination of sound, describing a link between nature and human being.