otay:onii (Lane Shi) is a multifaceted artist originally from Haining, China, formerly based in New York and now living in Berlin. Her artistic practice spans music, performance, installation and film composition.
Her work has received recognition and awards, including the bronze prize for Best Female Vocalist at the Global Music Awards and Best Sound at the Audiovisual Arts Industrial Incubator Awards. Performance pieces such as Unwrap!, presented at the Ming Contemporary Art Museum, give form to her concept of “bio instruments”. She has performed at Harvard University and at festivals including SXSW, Roadburn Festival, CTM, Fusion, Creepy Teepee, Le Guess Who?, Fekete Zaj and Full of Lava. She takes part in the opera Sancta by Florentina Holzinger, and is among the artists selected by Shape+, the platform for innovative music and audiovisual art, for 2024-25. Her work moves across registers, from humour to the painful realities of immigration from the so-called third world, bringing a rooted eastern perspective to the western world in an attempt to bridge the divide.
Her albums — NAG (2018), MíngMíng 冥冥 (2021) and Dream Hacker (2023) — resist conventional structures and foreground philosophies drawn from lived experience. The most recent, True Faith Ain’t Blind, sets classical and metal against one another through acoustic piano and voice. Her performances in Roadburn Festival’s first Triennium programme will give voice to tales never told.
ph. Karol Grygoruk