Growing up in a small traditional courtyard in the Beijing hutongs, Guo Yue experienced the madness of the Cultural Revolution at first hand, losing his mother to the Red Guards at the age of nine. Finding spiritual and creative solace in nature, cooking ingredients and a little bamboo flute, Yue went on to become an army musician for The People’s Republic of China – his flutes the tools of the Revolution – before finding freedom in the West. Discovered by Peter Gabriel, who describes his work as ‘magical’, he has performed and recorded with international artists and orchestras all over the world, teaches the art and philosophy of Chinese cooking, and has written two books with his wife Clare Farrow: Music, Food and Love, and Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing. His unique flute sound can be heard on the soundtrack of Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and Channel Four’s Beyond the Clouds. As the director Phil Agland wrote, Guo Yue creates ‘sounds that haunt the soul’. Above all his work is about freedom - as fragile and powerful as the transparent wings of a dragonfly, captured in his composition of that name for Music, Food and Love (Real World Records). Yue will be appearing on UK TV Food this year in the series Rhodes Across China.