A pear-shaped Chinese lute and a Ukrainian instrument built for storytelling epics will share a stage in Greenville next week, when the Sigal Music Museum presents “Boundless,” a collaboration between pipa virtuoso Min Xiao-Fen and bandura master Julian Kytasty. The concert is set for Nov. 7 at 7:30 p.m., with doors opening at 7 p.m., at the museum's location at 516 Buncombe St.
The Greenville date follows the project's world premiere and album release at Lincoln Center in April, according to the Greenville Journal. Billed by the Sigal Music Museum as “a groundbreaking collaboration between two visionary artists,” the duo will perform a 90-minute set blending traditional repertoire, original compositions, improvisation and vocal song, moving between solos and duets.
Min plays the pipa, a pear-shaped, four-stringed lute she says dates back thousands of years, along with sanxian, ruan, sound effects and voice, per the museum's program notes. Kytasty's bandura, a plucked string instrument with a distinctive array of strings, carries a tradition of accompanying songs and storytelling; he has described the instruments the two play as storytelling tools once used to accompany epic narratives.
Two Instruments, One Shared History of Migration
Both musicians are classically trained and were shaped by their work with avant-garde icon Derek Bailey, according to the Sigal Music Museum. That shared grounding in improvisation underpins “Boundless,” which the museum says explores music's role in carrying memories, shaping identity and evolving across borders. Min has said music can cross cultural barriers and bring people together, and that both instruments produce bright sounds capable of expressive melodies.
One piece on the program, Min's “Xi Xi, Cuo Cuo (Wash and Rub),” draws inspiration from the overlooked history of Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta, the museum notes. Kytasty's “Travel Music” tells a different migration story: it features a bandura crafted by Iosyp Shizhny, a performer who fled the USSR through Manchuria, settled in Shanghai, then escaped China in 1948 and brought the instrument to Buenos Aires. Kytasty discovered that same bandura in 1987 and brought it to New York, per the museum's account.
The two artists' paths crossed cultural lines decades before this collaboration began. Min performed in Kyiv in 1988 as part of a Chinese cultural exchange, the Sigal Music Museum notes, while Kytasty has lived in New York's East Village since the 1980s. Kytasty has said the two are creating new expressions with instruments carrying deep traditions, a theme NativeDSD Music echoed in describing how the album dissolves boundaries between folk antiquity and contemporary improvisation, and between immigrant memory and cultural survival.
From New York Recording Sessions to a Lincoln Center Premiere
The pair recorded “Boundless” in New York at the end of August 2025, Min told The Tonearm, which described the resulting album as a nexus where tradition, improvisation and cross-cultural communication converge. The record then had its world premiere and release at Lincoln Center on April 17, 2026, according to Min Xiao-Fen's own website, and it's now available on all major streaming services. Two days after that premiere, the duo performed at Solar Myth in Philadelphia, per Ars Nova Workshop, which also notes that Kytasty was awarded the title Honoured Artist of Ukraine by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in September 2021.
Min, who spent many years in New York City, now lives in Asheville — a connection reflected in the duo's Nov. 5 stop at Asheville's AyurPrana Listening Room, as reported by Mountain Xpress. Greenville audiences will get their turn two days later. Tickets for the Sigal Music Museum concert run $10 to $30, and additional information is available by calling the museum at 864-520-8807.
The Greenville concert arrives amid wider interest in pipa-centered programming nationally; The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted pipa player Wu Man performing Lou Harrison's Pipa Concerto with The Knights in September 2025, underscoring the instrument's growing presence on American concert stages. For Greenville, though, “Boundless” offers something rarer: a direct pairing of Chinese and Ukrainian traditions, built from instruments that have each carried stories of exile and migration long before this collaboration began.
