E-Zither is a modern version of Guzheng. Guzheng has always been more than an instrument. It’s a sculpture of sound — long, resonant, poetic. Every string carries centuries of Chinese musical heritage. So, when Jade Inno came to Qi Liu with a concept for an electric Guzheng, they weren’t asking for a redesign — they were asking for a redefinition.
The goal wasn’t to modernize for the sake of novelty. It was about amplifying the spirit of the Guzheng through design — preserving its soul, while gently bending its form toward the future.
The starting point of this project wasn’t digital. It was silence. Qi Liu spent time with traditional Guzhengs, not just observing them but listening to how they sat in a room, how they asked to be played, how they filled space. From that point of respect, he began peeling back the unnecessary, uncovering a new silhouette that still felt rooted in its ancestry.
The final form of E-Zither became geometrically cleaner, visually lighter — but never cold. This project wanted edges that caught the light like calligraphy strokes and surfaces that still invited human touch. This electric Guzheng doesn’t abandon wood — it elevates it, pairing it with refined matte metals and subtle digital accents to introduce a new kind of tactile duality.
E-Zither, this electric Guzheng concept becomes a cornerstone in building Jade Inno’s larger design vocabulary. It set the tone — literally and figuratively — for what modern traditional instruments could look like when liberated from conventional constraints. It’s no longer just a cultural artifact. It’s an object of personal identity. Something that could sit as comfortably in a living room as in a recording studio or on a live stage under a lightshow. It speaks to musicians who grew up between scrolls and screens.
