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“Imagine playing the piano on the Moon,” says Yuja Wang, grinning. The 37-year-old concert pianist mimes a slow-motion bounce from thumb to little finger and laughs. I’m mesmerised by her small, sinewy hands, which are more often seen in a blurred frenzy as she fizzes through an encore of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee. In January, she wore a fitness tracker on her wrist to monitor her heartbeat during a three-and-a-half-hour Rachmanivov “marathon” at New York’s Carnegie Hall, in which she performed all four of the Russian composer’s concertos, in addition to his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – those same fluttering fingers producing almost 100,000 notes. Through one famously difficult passage in Concerto No 3 - with which Wang is usually familiar, having performed it more than 70 times in her career so far - her heart rate stayed at a calm 85bpm; but during the finale to Concerto No 4, it soared to 149bmp. Last year, Wang came down from a different kind of flight. She’s just emerged from a screening of The Moonwalkers at Lightroom, in King’s Cross, where filmed footage of the 1969 Moon landings is projected on all four walls and the floor of the London venue, while viewers can stretch out on beanbags, listening to a narration by Tom Hanks, and image themselves in space. “I’d definitely go to the Moon if I could,” says Wang. “It looks so joyful, the way you just float - so beautiful, so emotional...” In September, she went back at Lightroom to play the piano while wall-high enlargements of works by David Hockney - interspersed with live footage of her own fingers skittering across the Steinway keyboard - illuminate the space” her daring, dazzling style a perfect match for Hockney’s own. It’s something of an encore: she first performed at Lightroom in September last year 2023, when Hockney himself was among the audience, and “is so excited to do it again.” Indeed, immediately after we meet, Wang – who bounds into the room in a baggy black hoodie, neon-orange Lycra skater skirt and trainers – is heading off to dine with the 87-year-old artist. Wang’s publicist has warned me not to ask her about clothes: she thinks there are already too many column inches developed to the hummingbird pizzazz of her designer wardrobe. Too much debate over the length of Wang’s skirt and the height of the heels she wears, even for performances accompanied by formally dressed orchestral players in some of the world’s most august concert halls. In a thread on the Piano World website, music lovers rip onto her stage attire – arguing that it is “undignified” and even “immoral” – while others defend her furiously, pointing out the many immoral and undignified acts of history’s most celebrated composers, and arguing that morality and dignity were “never part of the classical music” anyway. In the event, Wang is the one to bring up the subject of clothes, twanging the orange skirt she says she chose for today because she wanted to dress “colorfully” for Hockney. “I think key signatures all have their own colors. too,” she adds. When choosing the music for the Hockey gigs, for example, she felt his Californian swimming pool paintings “obviously” called for Debussy, while his forest landscapes demanded Satie because “French music is like the smell you get after rainfall on leaves.” Although she was born in Beijing, in 1987, Wang (who now has US Citizenship) says she doesn’t like to be described as a “Chinese pianist, or a female pianist, or any of those adjectives. I’ve just seen our planet from the Moon and that way you don’t see those borders or distinctions.” She pauses and catches herself, “Although I did also just see them put an American flag on the Moon, so...”A birdlike shrug. “I am American now myself,” she says.