Singaporean pianist and composer Churen Li mesmerised and challenged audiences at her recent show, Chopin vs AI, part of the Poland Shiok cultural festival taking place now in Singapore.
The Chamber at The Arts House at the Old Parliament House is a room steeped in character and history. Leather cushioned mahogany benches remain in place - since the colonial building was repurposed to house Singapore’s new parliament in 1965. I am seated across the floor from the Founding Father, Lee Kuan Yew’s chair. In his welcome, Polish Ambassador to Singapore, His Excellency, Tadeusz Chomicki, jokes that he has cordoned it off for the night’s performance to stop people fighting for the seat!
In the minutes before the concert commences the chitter chatter of networking in Polish, English, French, Mandarin rises, proof of the melting pot that Singapore has always been. Behind each seat are affixed the original metal translation boxes, that allowed the early parliamentarians and visitors to dial a knob to their preferred language – English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil. I could not help thinking that for that night, and for these times, we need to add a new language setting to the dial - AI. Artificial Intelligence.
I am here on invitation from the Polish Embassy for Chopin vs AI, a piano concert featuring Singaporean pianist and composer, Churen Li. The show is part of a series of events for Poland Shiok, a month-long Polish cultural festival, that commenced on 12 April and runs to 20 May, celebrating its 10th year.
In this show, Churen Li confronts AI head on, challenging the audience to distinguish between original compositions by Polish composer, Frederic Chopin, and those composed by AI music generator app, Suno - from which Li transcribed to sheet music and learnt to play. An online polling system accessible by QR code was created for the show, allowing the audience to vote after each piece – asking, was it Chopin or AI?
Li explained, “AI uses probability on a very large scale to make all sorts of decisions about timing, feeling, pitches, textures, timbres and rhythms. It does not learn from the first principles of harmony, chords, phrases, or melodies. And it's also not thinking in terms of storytelling, or developing a narrative of feelings. AI does not do that because it uses probability. So, I invite you all to really listen, and reflect on what it means to be human.”
Churen Li is a pianist of the zeitgeist, collaborating fiercely with new technologies, and challenging audiences to appreciate centuries-old composers with fresh ears.
- Miriam Feiler
At the end of the show, the overall results of the quiz were announced. The audience was able to correctly identify Chopin vs AI only 49% of the time. What this highlights is the danger of AI for creatives seeking to protect their work; as well as for you and me, in being able discern what is original work, and what is not.
AI is trained on everything that has come before it. If you are an artist – a writer, musician or visual artist - you spend your lifetime developing your unique sound and style. That uniqueness is what makes us, as human beings, able to look at an artwork and immediately know that it is a Van Gogh or a Picasso, or listen to a piece of music and immediately recognise it as Mozart, or Beethoven, or Chopin. However, with the advent of AI, I can now ask, for example, for the software to rewrite my written manuscript in the "style" of, say, Salman Rushdie. For artists, this poses a real and present threat to their creativity, authorship and copyright.
This is the gift that Churen Li gives her audiences with these shows - a moment in time to consider the very real consequences of artificial intelligence on humanity.
Yet, while exploring the intellectualism behind Li’s Chopin vs AI, it would be remiss of me to bypass her extraordinary talent as a pianist and composer. Li is at one with her piano. Her fingers glide with such elegance and grace that the notes sweep seemingly effortlessly into the air, like silk fabric floating above, around and through you all at once.
My highlight of the night was Churen’s Li’s own composition, A Prelude on Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, as it gave the audience a chance to focus, not on polls or AI, but on this remarkable pianist and composer - an artist who has enriched Singapore’s cultural landscape, and is carrying the torch of Singaporean talent, globally.
See Churen Li perform at the Singapore International Piano Festival at her recital, Echoes and Refractions, on 2 July 2026. The 32nd Singapore International Piano Festival (SIPF), presented by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra runs from July 2–5, 2026, under new Artistic Director, Albert Tiu. Themed "The Pianist, Composer and Improviser," the festival features four days of concerts at the Esplanade Recital Studio featuring Conrad Tao, Hyung-ki Joo, Sean Chen, Jon Kimura Parker, Churen Li, and Jonathan Shin.
Images courtesy of Embassy of Poland in Singapore
