Dr August Guan is an early keyboardist, organist and musicologist based in Cheltenham. After early training in conducting at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where he co-founded Mainland China's first academic early music institute, he studied harpsichord at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. During his MMus and subsequent doctoral studies at Cardiff University he served as church organist at parishes in Cardiff and Penarth, and as accompanist to the Cardiff University Symphonic Chorus. He completed his PhD in 2023, with a thesis examining eighteenth-century English keyboard arrangements as a critical site for questioning modern assumptions about genre, authenticity and the work-concept. He presented research at conferences in Bristol, London and Belfast.

Alongside his doctoral studies he trained as an organ renovation assistant with a specialist organ building firm, working on instruments across Wales and the West of England, and built a harpsichord after the 1769 Taskin model. He has held posts as Director of Music at Oakham Team Ministry; as organist at St George in the Meadows, Nottingham, where he curated an anonymous consort organ dating from around 1680; and as Sub-Organist at Brecon Cathedral, where he reintroduced Gregorian Chant into regular worship.

Since late 2024 he has been titulaire organist at St Gregory's Catholic Church, Cheltenham, where he gives bi-monthly Organ Concerts of Ancient Music, free and open to the public.

His instrument of preference at St Gregory's is the chancel organ built by Dutch organ builder Sebastian Blank in 1986 in the classical Dutch style, whose clarity and tonal character are well suited to the Baroque and early keyboard repertoire that defines his work.