As a young boy in South Korea, Hahn-Bin was mesmerised by the scene in the Spielberg film ET where ET flies over the moon.
"We hear the most glorious theme music played by the violins, and I turned to my dad and asked him 'Dad, what is that voice?' He says 'It's not a voice, it's a violin,' but to me it was a voice and it was my voice," he said in a phone interview from New York, where he now lives.
"I think that's really telling why I strive so hard to make the music as magical and as glamorous as that moment was for a young boy. That's the moment where that dream was born to communicate this universal language to the world."
Amadeus Leopold, the name he chose for his American citizenship, started learning violin in South Korea when he was 5, and moved to the United States with his parents when he was 10 so he could study at the Colburn School of Performing Arts.
For 10 years he studied at Julliard with Itzhak Perlman, who was quoted in a New York Times article as saying "[Hahn Bin] is an extremely talented violinist who is very, very individual. He combines music with drama and a visual element. It's very personal to him. When an artist feels it that personally, the audience does too."
Leopold says Perlman was the only person in the classical world who understood who he truly was.
"He introduced me to a different way of understanding classical music. He was never about following rules. He was about following what's organic to my artistic DNA. He would always ask me 'What do you see? What do you imagine? What do you want this performance to be?'," he said.
Now 25, Leopold is forging a name for himself as a gifted classical violinist - his rich varied tone and technical facility is admired by critics and he's even been likened to Kreisler and Paganini - who performs in glamorous, sometimes audacious, gender-blurring costumes and make-up.
"It wasn't until my Paris debut at the Louvre Museum when I was 18 that I began to really truly understand that my purpose in life was to serve the world with what for me has been such a tremendous gift as a universal language - the classical music that I play. I'm able to communicate that universal language through my fingers," he says.
He describes himself as a performance artist who sings through the violin. He performs like a pop musician but with, he says, "utmost integrity in terms of violin technique. But it's a very intimate recital setting with the violin and piano, and it's a tribute to an era that no longer seems to exist - the days of Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland and Elvis Presley, where artists truly bared their souls and you could see they were there just for the audience. That's what I do on the stage, really serve my audiences".
"The renaissance of classical music" is the title he gives to his vision and overarching project to bring what he describes as "a quarantined musical genre" back into the mainstream. He wants to overthrow the division between classical and pop music.
Although he says he's been performing for 20 years, he considers his breakthrough performance was last year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York because many of his idols were in attendance, among them Madonna, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith and Cindy Sherman.
"To have their support, for a young artist, is a bit like being lit on fire. That was the moment where I really knew this was what I was meant to be doing.
"I think I was born with this identity. I don't do anything other than my music and performing. That's one of the reasons I'm always so terrible when people ask me after shows 'So are you going out to party?' and I tell them 'I just partied in front of you on stage'," he said.
"That's where I came alive. That's where I had the most fun, and to share that sense of joy and playfulness - the stage is my playground. That's just who I've always been."
In Dunedin he is performing a show entitled Till Dawn Sunday, which he describes as going from the darkest hour of the night to the most meaningful sunrise you can imagine on Sunday.
"It's about my personal journey as a minority in every sense of the word. It's about the struggle to retain what is true to me and the fight for freedom, the fight for equality and the fight for joy in my life."
The first half, entitled "The death of Hahn-Bin", explores the gypsy element, demonic aspects in works like Baal Shem and Danse Macabre, while the second half, "The birth of Amadeus Leopold" pays "tribute to those who know what it is like to have gone through the struggle but are still able to have a smile on their face. There are tributes to African American [performers] as well as my ultimate idol, Judy Garland", he says.
He's excited about performing in Dunedin, Nelson and Melbourne on this tour, because he's hungry to get back on stage after spending the past few weeks recording an album.
"To me, the stage is where I belong," he says.
Hear him
Amadeus Leopold is performing Till Dawn Sunday as part of the Otago Festival of the Arts with pianist Or Mathias, also a former student of Itzhak Perlman. They will play at the Otago Girls' High School auditorium in Tennyson St on October 10 at 7.30pm.
