People

Lei Zhang

Lei Zhang

Chairman & CEO, Hillhouse Capital Management Group

Biography

Lei Zhang is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Hillhouse Investment Management Group, Ltd. Hillhouse manages over fourteen billion U.S. dollars for leading endowments, foundations, sovereign funds, and family offices. Hillhouse takes a long-term fundamental research approach and invests in both public and private opportunities across a variety of sectors.

Zhang earned an MBA and M.A. in International Relations from Yale University and a B.A. in Economics from Renmin University of China, where he is the Vice Chairman and Trustee of the Board. In addition, he serves on the University Council at Yale University and is the Chairman of Yale Asia Development Council. Mr. Zhang is a Trustee of the Yale-NUS College, a newly formed liberal arts institute of higher education that is a collaboration between Yale University and the National University of Singapore. Prior to founding Hillhouse in 2005, Mr. Zhang worked with the Yale Endowment and an emerging market fund covering South Africa and Southeast Asia.

Zhang served on the board of several of Asia’s leading companies, including JD.com, China’s largest Internet retailer; Qunar, China’s largest online travel vertical; Blue Moon, a leading Chinese household personal care company; and MNC Global Mediacom, Indonesia’s largest media/ TV/ Pay TV conglomerate. Zhang devotes substantial time to education issues. He is a board member of BN Vocational School, China’s largest non‐profit organization dedicated to the education of underprivileged children, and a founding board member of the United World College (UWC) of Southeast Asia Foundation.

Zhang was previously a member of the 21st Century Council.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE