Cover art is by the renowned satirist Badiucao

If you transcribed every twisted, bitter, sick thought you ever had about China, tied it to a brick, then repeatedly smashed it into someone’s skull, you might give them an experience akin to reading Arthur Meursault’s debut novel Party Members (Camphor Press). There is no more unrelentingly savage satire of modern China ever written, and perhaps deserves more attention than it received.

The book traces the journey of Yang Wei, an unremarkable junior official (“one of a billion, not in a billion”) in a third-tier city, destined for the unheralded heights of utter mediocrity — until his penis gains consciousness, and starts telling him exactly what he needs to do to get ahead.

Less a phallic nod to Kafka than a Sino-cidal literary replay of the (largely forgotten) Richard E. Grant movie How to Get Ahead in Advertising, a satire about an ad man with a vicious boil that tell him what to do, it would be far too easy to dismiss Party Members  as a crude schoolboy ode to the adage that men think with their dicks. That would miss the point.

Such is Meursault’s anger with Chinese society that he has intentionally deployed the most vulgar metaphor he can find to prod at its leaders: He thinks Party members are a bunch of dicks and says so, occasionally to devastating effect.

Not for the easily offended or those who lean toward hugging pandas, Meursault’s China flows with faeces, saliva and urine. A man gets clubbed to death by a giant penis. There is a vigorous anal rape. The lust for luxury car-ownership sees men furiously getting off in showroom Audis. Those with a taste for the grotesque will revel in any number of set pieces, many of which are masturbatory: “When they were not talking or playing with their phones, Rainy would lie next to Yang Wei, playing with his penis, letting her hands glide up and down the thick, meaty sausage like an Amazon warrior polishing her spear.”

The venomous sneering takes aim at almost every conceivable headline issue: Food scandals, greed, corruption, pollution, inequality, urban management, civic values, public defecation, GDP obsession, education, parenting, marriage, government and, of course, the Party. In lesser hands, this might be nothing more than the race-tinged rantings of a long-term expat, expanding (condensing?) his every negative thought about China into a flimsy fictional pretext. But Party Members’ dark humour, technical prowess, and outlandish exuberance save it from such a fate — though it sails dangerously close to the wind at times.

A typical members-only party

What mostly saves the book is that it is often very funny (sometimes laugh-out-loud so), not to mention savagely accurate, despite its obvious excesses. It is that rare more than half a dozen pages pass without some pithy caricature or barb, whether it’s aimed at the nation’s terrible television (“…his aging wife falling asleep in front of part 63 of a 745 episode of a Korean soap opera…”) or obsession with Japanese militarism. Often both are merged to comic effect: “Three minutes later, Yang Wei walked over from his chair, swiped the remote from her, and changed the channel back to the local TV channel’s premiere of Let’s Nuke Tokyo 3.”

China’s often ham-fisted attempts at propaganda are easily satirized, and the description of Yang Wei’s third-tier as  “THE FOREST OF PROGRESS” and “THE PARIS OF ASIA” are less satire than stenography (compare the shithole concrete reality of Dongguan, a textiles hub, with its National Foreign City status). So too, the surreal effect of the cuddly, yet sinister sloganeering: “The smiley faces, dancing cats, and knock-off copies of Japanese anime characters that she normally chose to decorate the Party’s contemporary slogans gave off the air of a benevolent dictatorship controlled by a schizophrenic four year old.”

Dongguan (above) as it imagines itself

Dongguan (above) as it is

Sometimes it is difficult to tell if China’s development is more inspired by Charlie Chaplin or Joseph Stalin, a point made in the book by channeling that other totalitarian satirist, George Orwell: “It was a bright, cold day in April, and the large clock atop the Ministry building was striking thirteen. Actually, it was supposed to strike twelve, but there had been a mix-up during the clock’s manufacture and nobody could be bothered to change it.”

For all its searing rage, and certainly because of it, the book has its faults. It does not have any gears: going from neutral observation to China-is-completely-and-utterly-fucked up within a few pages, never really slowing down or changing direction. For those that like their narratives to have a natural rhythm and flow, to gently undulate with plot twists and emotional highs and lows… this is not the book. Aside from the plot-device of an unwieldy and absurdist talking penis, the novel is a bit one-track, like a hammer brutally smashing rusty nails into one’s head, page after page after page.

There’s also a sense that this merciless savagery damages the fiction itself. In the absence of any characters to care about, with Chinese cities given no color other than the bleakest grey, the effect is brutally numbing, making it easy to switch off. If the aim of satire is to affect some type of change, then Party Members misses the mark. The book’s monotonous ferocity drains the book of the emotional impact it might have delivered, enticing the reader to think China is getting exactly what it deserves — and nothing can be done about. That bleakness—nihilism, really — might be too much for some readers to bear. For others, it might be just the tonic.

The author, Carlos Ottery, is on Twitter @CharlesOutre

The worst possible intrusion of commerce, at the service of a fake commercial holiday, in the guise of cleverness.

(Video via People’s Daily)

SHANGHAI COCKTALES (A Memoir)

It’s one of the gifts of China that there’s something to write about on every street corner. It’s one of the curses of China that expats keep writing about themselves instead.

That’s not to say there isn’t rich material in it. Somewhere outside the Fourth Ring Road, a nondescript borderline-alcoholic English teacher might be polishing off the manuscript of the China equivalent to The Sun Also Rises. Escape, reinvention, exoticism, disillusionment – it’s all there for a novelist or memoirist, plus baijiu, smog and as many happy endings as you can afford. There’s definitely a way to do it right, make it funny, and say something meaningful about how us foreigners (with nowhere else in particular to go) engage with China, or don’t. There’s also a way to do it wrong, and come across as a goon who can’t write his way out of a paper bag.

By now you should be getting an idea of what kind of a review this is going to be.

As a writerly sort and interested party, I occasionally read books which are memoirs – sometimes thinly veiled as fiction – of the expat in question’s China years. Some are entertaining, others as interesting as a concrete overpass. Many have weird hang-ups about sex. Most feature heavy drinking as a centrepiece. Almost all can be summed up in a single sentence: “Look at this crazy wacky time I’m having in China!” But I’ve never seen one which combines all of the things I hate in China writing between two covers until I read the self-published Shanghai Cocktales: A Memoir by Tom Olden.

Can we dwell on that title for a moment? Shanghai Cocktales. It sounds like some “friend” of Olden’s dared him to write a book based around that single, shitty 2am pun. I’m sure it sounded funny after five rounds at his local, but Olden woke up the next morning and still went with it. The chapters are called “Cocktale One,” “Cocktale Two,” and so on until you wish you were dead or drinking that sixth cocktail. Tom Olden (a pseudonym) has all the subtlety and ear for language of a horny, deaf-blind goat. If he ran this blog, it would no doubt be called Beijing Spunk.

The plot is more or less a blow-by-blow dirge of Olden’s nights out, sexual conquests and job interviews in Shanghai from his arrival as a twenty something year-old in 1999 (“the year of the Rabbit”, thanks for that) until now. It’s billed as a memoir but reads like bad fiction. The second sentence begins “As the only white male on a half-full flight, I gratefully enjoyed the extra attention the nubile air hostesses gave me,” and goes downhill from there. I would happily write off that half-full flight as collateral damage if the plane had only crashed and spared us the rest.

Promotional image for ‘Shanghai Cocktales’

At the airport, Olden meets his mate Alex, who wows him by giving an address in Chinese to their taxi driver. (“‘Whadde’fuck?’” … “‘You speak Chinese? Fuck me!’” … “‘Ching-chong, ching-chong, you’re the man.’”) There’s also some artful exposition when Alex quizzes Olden about why he left everything to come to China and asks about a girl called Marie. “‘She’s over and out. Bitch!’”, comes the reply. (“If it hadn’t been for her,” Olden delusionally muses later,“I could have spent my entire time on campus banging freshmen.”) It’s frequently revealed that Olden has “nightmares where I would wake up, bathed in cold sweat, panting from seeing Marie and Kurt in joyous copulation.” I’m on Team Kurt.

It’s not just snappy comebacks and scintillating interior monologue that Olden puts in italics. It’s every sentence he thinks is clever. On local eating habits: “How the fuck can they eat cold fish for breakfast?” On people he doesn’t like: “I’d party with anyone but her. Even French people.” On his soul-crushingly bland inner life: “You’re here now. In Shanghai. Ready for a new beginning.” His favourite refrain is “Whadde’fuck?” Sometimes he switches into italics for whole paragraphs, just for kicks. He also does that irritating thing where he writes the pinyin followed by the English (“‘Mei you wenti.’ No problem”) because ching-chong, ching-chong, he’s the man.

For someone who lived in China for sixteen years, it’s hard to believe how little of interest happened to Olden. He tries valiantly to keep things topical – the Belgrade embassy bombing, the Internet boom – but inevitably gets sucked back into the dull minutia of his sexpatscapades. In one meat market, he picks up a girl with the sparkling line “Hey – can I buy you a drink?” Her reply is “OK. First, toilet”, and I know how she feels. There are exactly two entertaining moments in the book – one where he is fleeced by the notorious teahouse scam into paying a huge dinner bill, the second where he is scammed by conmen posing as police when he’s with a prostitute. Finally, something worth cheering for.

Every woman Olden meets is immediately judged on her appearance. The idea persists among some foreigners – dare I say, especially in Shanghai? – that China is populated by porcelain dolls just waiting to jump into bed with them. Most of the time, it’s just run-of-the-mill Asian sexpot sophomoric dross, which isn’t worth quoting, although I kid you not that the first Chinese girl he runs into tells him he’s handsome and gives him an “exotic giggle.” Often it’s nastier, such as a bargirl who is “probably in her early thirties and had certainly been a pretty girl at some point in life, but now she looked pale and pinched, her slanted eyes rimmed by darkened circles.” I would give anything for a jacket shot of Olden so I could treat him the same.

Besides his alleged close encounters with Shanghai’s beauties, the rest of the book is Olden’s job interviews and miscellaneous score settling, which is all about as fun to read as drinking melamine from the can. He does the rounds of early city magazine websites and paints thinly veiled portraits of various friends and foes using false names. The climactic moment of the memoir is Olden landing a job that pays twelve thousand yuan a month, presumably vindicating him to all his enemies. There’s a whole paragraph about how boring a meeting was. To quote the master: Whadde’fuck?

If you’re a masochist, you can buy the book on Amazon, where there are thirteen customer reviews, all five stars, many of which overuse his full name in the same way. Something tells me the IP log would be revealing. I can’t imagine it sold like hot cakes, as half a year later he started giving it away for free on Twitter.

@Bueller @Bueller @Anyone… @Anyone?

I had an email exchange with Olden – he knows this review is coming – who wrote “I am aware that many people will not appreciate the story, but I wanted to tell it as it was.” He changed the names of people and companies, but everything else is accurate “as I remember it” (unspecified after how many drinks). The motivation to write the thing, he argued, was so that “when someone picks up the book 20-40 years from now, they’ll get a true picture of Shanghai in 1999.”

Curious about this mysterious auteur (Olden’s author bio says he “grew up in a small fishing village outside of Malmo, Sweden”), I asked some friends in Shanghai and we did a half-hearted human flesh search. Eventually, with the help of RFH, I tracked down someone who knows him and was in Shanghai over the same period. “It’s representative of the mindset of foreigners in China in that era,” he told me. “It’s reprehensible drivel, but unfortunately it’s the best record we’ve got.”

You might wonder – I certainly am – why I’m bothering to do a hatchet job on a self-published book with a fundamentally unlikeable narrator that no one except a few of Olden’s remaining mates will read. It’s not the first piece of grot to be written by an LBH (Loser Back Home) who got shanghai’ed into China and thinks his story is unique, and it won’t be the last. Worse books and blogs have been written. As to the offensive sexist stuff, he’s just a minnow in the slipstream of trouts like China Bounder, Robert Black and Isham Cook.

Part of it, I’ll confess, is that writing this is one way to claw some enjoyment back from the hours lost reading the bloody thing. But more than that, it’s because with every tone-deaf sentence I’m reminded of what we might be missing. Again, The Sun Also Rises was also narcissistic foreigners drinking all day. Here’s Hemingway: “You know what’s the trouble with you? You’re an expatriate. … You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You’re an expatriate. You hang around cafés.” And here’s Olden, via one of his dolls: “‘Many, many fun in Shanghaijj,’ she lashed on, shaking her head sideways. ‘Yo come anytime and we take care o’yo. Good time. Ayi-yaah. Many fun. Many, many fun…’”

Mostly, I’m reviewing this book because Olden told me that, after sixteen years, he is leaving China in a few months. I want to leave him a memento to remember us by. To borrow his own italicised phrase about a girl he doesn’t take a shine to: “You cannot let bitches like that go without a slap.”

Alec Ash is a writer and journalist in Beijing, and editor of the Anthill. Information and purchasing details of Shanghai Cocktales are on Facebook or Amazon (includes video). For a much more charitable take on this memoir, the Kirkus Review says it “gives readers plenty to think about.”

UPDATE, 6/4, 12:30 am: here’s our response to Tom Olden’s official response to Alec Ash’s review.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

Life is a complex, blending the normal and the absurd in often disorienting combinations. That mystery and confusion inspires Liu Yichao, a 25-year old artist whose paintings meld weird creatures and narratives to invite the viewer into an illogical but familiar place.

“Artists born in earlier generations often name ancient paintings as their favorites because these survived China’s cultural and social upheavals,” Liu says. “But speaking for myself, my art is inspired by childhood memories, personal experience and the way I see the world.”

Born in Huizhou, a humid costal city of Guangdong province, Liu spent most of his childhood catching fish and playing in the subtropical forests. Although he never studied art until middle school, his childhood experiences significantly shaped his artistic language.

In Drama, his ongoing series, Liu depicts a clown swimming in a lush broad-leaved forest. Created using different shades of green, the image gives a strong sense of freshness and freedom.

“I’m a nostalgic person, and many of my works are related to my experiences. My childhood environment lets me appreciate sea life. The freedom of marine fish is what I long for the most,” Liu says.

That nostalgia can also be found in Big Cat and His Toy, a 2013 painting. In the picture, Liu presents himself as a boy with a cat face who sits in front of a fish-shaped boat. Although the imagery appears surreal at first glance, closer examination conveys as sense of loneliness and isolation.

It’s nothing new for young artists to feel confused and anxious while groping for truth in society, but Liu does an impeccable job of translating this collective uncertainty into his own artistic language. His personal emotions shine through in each work.

In Sorrows (above), Liu depicts a love triangle between a skeleton, a mannequin and a clown. The clown’s face is so vivid that viewers can feel his disappointment and the pain of losing his lover. By contrast, Happiness shows a sweet mood in which a girl dances to the rhythm of a drum-headed musician. Although there are many weird elements in these works, Liu’s warm tones make the pictures unexpectedly reasonable.

That atmosphere has continued in Liu’s work since graduation. Since finishing his studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2013, his paintings have grown ever more anxious.

In Playing with Fires in 2014, Liu captures a scene of five cigarettes surrounding a burning bonfire in a quiet park. The anthropomorphized cigarettes have a curving appearance that leaves the viewer space to imagine.

“When I painted that picture, I had just graduated from school and was confused about the future. Then I started to smoke and thought the nicotine would help kill the pain. I was like a boy playing with fire to escape from the adult world,” he says.

As with many young artists, the pain Liu expresses through his work is a necessary step for growing up. But as an artist who regards art as an ideal, the only thing he can do is hang on and wait for change in a seemingly static state, just like the plants in his pictures.

“I appreciate the growing process of plants. They develop in a static state, which seems a bit like my personality,” Liu says.

“It’s hard to make a living as a young and unknown artist. But I still find satisfaction and pleasure every time I finish a new work. Staying optimistic and sticking to our dreams is essential.”

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today. It’s republished here with permission.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

It’s hard to imagine that the Tibetan inspired art of Wang Yiguang is the work of a man who grew up on the North China Plain. But Tibet’s vigorous yaks, winding railways and cheerful girls have been the subject of Wang’s creations since he first set foot on the magical plateau in 2002.

Unlike his Tibet-obsessed peers who focus on the scenery of the Tanggula Mountains and highland prairies, Wang expresses his love for the plateau through super-realist images of flying animals and Tibetans living in a dreamy and harmonious environment.

“I believe in animism and have always tried to find an appropriate way to express it through the interaction between humans and nature,” Wang says. “But the way escaped me until I came to Tibet.”

Born in 1962 in Linyi, Shandong province, Wang grew up with two artistic brothers and started to paint in middle school. When the Cultural Revolution ended and education resumed in 1977, Wang sat China’s first college entrance exam and was admitted to a local art school. He was assigned to work as an art teacher in Shandong province in 1980.

“To be honest, the reason I chose art as my major was because I just wanted to stay in the city. But the more I painted, the more I became fascinated with the art,” Wang says. After graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts with a master’s degree in oil painting in 1988, Wang became a graphic designer at the China Railway Construction Corporation.

The majority of Wang’s earlier works were realist paintings that displayed the daily life of villagers prior to the 1990s. But slowly, his work began to morph into neo-realism that combined the power of reality and the romance of imagination. The shift became obvious after he participated in the construction of Qinghai-Tibet Railway in 1992.

In the Fragrance of Kelsang Flowers, Wang depicts a local girl opening her arms and flying into the sky over a sea of highland flowers. The view of the yak’s back makes it seem the carefree girl is sharing her happiness with the creature.

The combination of Tibetan girls and yaks appear in many of Wang’s other works such as After Rian, painted in 2004, and Silent Communication, painted in 2014. Wang is obsessed with the poetic comparison between the Tibetan girls and the yaks, creatures with powerful energy and life force.

“The first time I went to the Tibetan Plateau I fainted due to altitude sickness and oxygen deficiency. The only thing I could do during my first couple days was lie on the grass and gasp for air,” Wang says. “But local kids and yaks could play so freely and happily around me. They were like the Flying Apsaras of the Duhuang Frescoes. That physical reaction let me admire the power of life on the Tibetan Plateau.”

Construction workers on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway are also an important theme in Wang’s work. In Full Moon Over Tanggula, painted in 2005, Wang captures the conditions of railway workers at the foot of snowcapped mountains. The glow of sunset and dancing locals offer a warm and cheerful sense.

“The Qinghai-Tibet Railway, construction workers and daily life on the plateau are the ore of my art. Strong artistic language can only come from the combination of the right artistic approach and the ability to capture life’s details,” Wang says.

Check out more paintings over at Wang Yiguang’s gallery.

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Ed’s note: Portrait of a Beijinger is an original video series for the Anthill by Tom Fearon and Abel Blanco. Each month, Tom and Abel will profile an ordinary Beijinger with an extraordinary story. The first episode in the series, along with Tom’s description of meeting its protagonist Liu Xinran, is republished with permission from the Anthill.

Liu Xinran has a face many Chinese women would envy. High cheekbones, smooth skin and a narrow chin give him a coveted guazilian or “melon-seed face”. He introduces himself in a voice much softer than the one that will fill the Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre in a few hours time.

“Did you find your way here OK?” he asks.

“No problem at all,” I reply, shaking his manicured hand.

We step into the 300 year old theatre. It is empty except for a couple of janitors whose vacuum cleaner drowns an erhu (Chinese fiddle) strummed by a young woman in glasses by the side of the stage.

Dressed in a knitted pullover, grey trousers and cloth shoes, Liu struts around stage waving a wand-like prop and warming up his vocal chords. He stares into the camera as if confronting an intruder on stage, his eyes as piercing as his voice. Each delicate step is timed to the downbeat of the erhu. A passionate argument of falsetto versus fiddle ensues, begging for an opera gong to weigh in and restore calm.

Peking opera has the shortest history of the hundreds of Chinese opera styles, but remains the most influential. The curtain fell on it during the Cultural Revolution when it was denounced as bourgeois, but curious tourists, nostalgic locals and state-run drama academies are providing a modern encore for a national treasure.

Liu, 38, is a rarity. Unlike many of the performers in his troupe who were trained as children, he took up the craft after quitting his job as a publicity clerk for the Beijing Meteorological Bureau in 2010. His parents protested, but his destiny had been sealed four years earlier when he won the top prize at the Beijing Amateur Peking Opera Competition.

He also stands out as one of only around a dozen active nandan performers in Beijing – men who portray female characters in Peking opera. I ask if he is inspired by the most famous nandan, Mei Lanfang, whose black-and-white portrait eyes us solemnly from the back of the theatre. But Liu says his mantra on stage is innovation, not imitation; copying Mei will lead to the “death of my artistic life”.

After the interview we head backstage. An old man irons sequined loose-sleeved costumes as the cast trickles in. There are no makeup artists or hair stylists; all preening is done by performers themselves. Eyes locked on their rapidly transforming reflections, they chat excitedly about plans for the upcoming Spring Festival.

An announcement prohibiting photography during the show is made as the audience settles into cushioned wooden chairs, but we are told it doesn’t apply to us. Apparently, we aren’t alone. Smartphone shutter noises click between cracking sunflower seeds throughout the show, but the performers aren’t fazed. Having their photos beamed on WeChat feeds might draw new faces the next night.

Later, Liu shows me his other passion: his beverage can collection. We walk down a narrow concrete corridor stained with cellphone numbers towards his eighth-floor apartment. A thick haze lingers overhead and firework debris dances below. Liu’s home is tidy, with a framed calligraphy scroll in the living room and an impressive collection of scotch and other expensive liquors. But he explains his year-round drink of choice is hot water, to protect his voice.

The cans are all in mint condition. It is a collector’s (and trash peddler’s) heaven. Sorted by age and location, each can contains a memory of a certain place or performance. Liu picks out a dozen of his favourites and gives them a gentle polish before lining them on a table in the living room for our slow dolly pan.

Before parting, Abel and I offer him a token of our appreciation – a nice bottle of Spanish olive oil and some TimTam chocolate biscuits from Australia. Mementos from our respective countries, to add to his collection.

Text, interviewing and subtitles are by Tom Fearon; cinematography and photos are by Abel Blanco.

Tom Fearon is a writer and editor who has lived in China since 2009. He worked in Chinese state media for many years, and previously as a print journalist in Cambodia and Australia. He now works in communications at an international school. You can read his poems for the Anthill here.

Abel Blanco is a videographer based in Beijing who formerly worked in broadcast media in Spain. You can see some of his other short films here.

Next month’s video is about a deli owner in Changping with a military relic museum in the basement. To recommend a person to be profiled in the series, please contact Tom.

This post originally appeared on the Anthill, where there are more photos of the performers.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

Carousels, Ferris wheels and bumper cars are the characters of artist Huang Saifeng’s amusement-themed paintings. His style blends fairytale settings with the dreamy feel of fading memory to evoke powerful nostalgia.

For most people, amusement parks are associated with happiness and fun. But the lonely amusement parks Huang creates are hard to connect with such uplifting concepts. Even when a lone figure appears it is just a shot of his back. Carousels dominate his pictures – so much so that many viewers mistake his work for mere paintings of the rides.

Huang’s technique is primarily inspired by childhood regret. “Although most children have some memory of visiting an amusement park, for some reason I was never able to go,” Huang said. “Even though I can go any time I want today, the feeling is totally different from what a child would experience.”

He compares his choice of subjects to Michael Jackson’s decision to build a large, private amusement park when he became rich.

In preparation for the series, Huang listened to the song “Xuan Mu” by Faye Wang. “I was inspired. The lyrics are about a carousel. I think it fits my creation – the topic of fleeting time.”

Huang said the painting “So Close, So Far Away” (below) best captures his personal regret over lost experiences. He painted it after a sad meeting up with two former classmates.

“We hadn’t spoken in a long time – since graduation really – but when we got together we didn’t have much to say,” he said. When the three passed by an inflatable amusement park, Huang felt their awkward atmosphere was in sharp contrast to that of the happy children playing inside.

“The seated man is my portrait,” Huang said, pointing at the picture. “Silent and lonely, I’m waiting for my friends to come. Sadly, they may never arrive.”

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

I didn’t want to like this — and I probably still don’t — but I will say: watching it, it gets better. If your goal in a music video is to out-weird PSY and the Ylvis (“The Fox”), you probably should go all out like Rolling Wang Rong did and do stuff like this:

Neatorama — possibly just to be polite — called Rollin Wang Rong’s (or Wang Rong Rollin) music “catchy and danceable.” Daily Mail collected some positive reviews from viewers. The Daily Beast had this take:

Wang Rong was a powerful 10th century warlord during the Tang Dynasty who, through a series of political maneuvers that would make Frank Underwood green with envy, rose to become the ruler of Zhao. It’s also the namesake of a female Chinese pop star that just released the most bonkers music video of the year.

“Chick Chick,” the latest tune by C-Pop sensation Wang Rong, is like “Gangnam Style” on MDMA. The video consists of dancers in white tutus clucking like chickens—all the lyrics consist of five different farm noises, from cuckoos to rooster clucks—and it only gets weirder from there.

We’re not entirely convinced (of anything). Does Wang Rong show postmodern musicality? Are there hidden meanings? New-age dance potential? Let’s discuss.

Here are some lyrics:

Mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken cluck cluck DAY

Small chicken small chicken small chicken small chicken small chicken small chicken small chicken cluck cluck DAY

Mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken cluck cluck DAY

Male chicken male chicken male chicken male chicken ah ah ah

Mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken cluck cluck DAY

Small chicken small chicken small chicken small chicken small chicken small chicken small chicken cluck cluck DAY

Mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken mother chicken cluck cluck DAY

The video has 5.2 million hits on YouTube and 2.56 million on Youku.

With his co-host in England for the month, the news comedy show C4’s Stuart Wiggin took a trip to the Shaolin Temple and returned with a travel diary that has gone viral in China. Why? There’s an interesting story here…

Luo Yonghao, the creator of the Smartisan phone who first rose to fame through English schools, recently posted on Sina Weibo a picture of a Japanese soy sauce pot, complimenting the Japanese on their attention to even small things.

As you might expect, some of the comments were positive, while some were not. And then — to illustrate how much attention the Chinese give to seemingly insignificant objects – someone posted a screenshot of this C4 episode in which Wiggin pretends to confuse a rubbish bin for a valuable ancient carving:

“And then my weibo account blew up and the show started to circulate,” Wiggin said via email. “Needless to say, some people think I actually legitimately didn’t know it was a bin. Obviously don’t get the idea of scripted comedy.”

Should’ve gone with that crosstalk skit.

Go visit C4′s Tumblr!

Part 2:

On Youku:

A week and a half ago, the China blog of the libertarian communism website libcom.org — Nao – published translations of the poetry of Foxconn worker Xu Lizhi, who committed suicide on September 30. As Nao notes, “By translating these poems, we aim to memorialize Xu, share some of his excellent literary work, and spread awareness that the harsh conditions, struggles and aspirations of Chinese migrant workers (including but not limited to Foxconn) have not diminished.”

Xu was 24. We’re republishing two poems here — one by Xu and one by Zhou Qizao, a colleague — but you should head over to Nao blog to read the rest. (Bloomberg reports Xu was a regular contributor to Foxconn People, the company’s internal newspaper in Shenzhen, before his death. His poems have since been circulating across Chinese and English websites.)

《我咽下一枚铁做的月亮》
“I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron”

我咽下一枚铁做的月亮
I swallowed a moon made of iron

他们把它叫做螺丝
They refer to it as a nail

我咽下这工业的废水，失业的订单
I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents

那些低于机台的青春早早夭亡
Youth stooped at machines die before their time

我咽下奔波，咽下流离失所
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution

咽下人行天桥，咽下长满水锈的生活
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust

我再咽不下了
I can’t swallow any more

所有我曾经咽下的现在都从喉咙汹涌而出
All that I’ve swallowed is now gushing out of my throat

在祖国的领土上铺成一首
Unfurling on the land of my ancestors

耻辱的诗
Into a disgraceful poem.

19 December 2013

~

《惊闻90后青工诗人许立志坠楼有感》
“Upon Hearing the News of Xu Lizhi’s Suicide”
by Zhou Qizao (周启早), a fellow worker at Foxconn

每一个生命的消失
The loss of every life

都是另一个我的离去
Is the passing of another me

又一枚螺丝松动
Another screw comes loose

又一位打工兄弟坠楼
Another migrant worker brother jumps

你替我死去
You die in place of me

我替你继续写诗
And I keep writing in place of you

顺便拧紧螺丝
While I do so, screwing the screws tighter

今天是祖国六十五岁的生日
Today is our nation’s sixty-fifth birthday

举国欢庆
We wish the country joyous celebrations

二十四岁的你立在灰色的镜框里微微含笑
A twenty-four-year-old you stands in the grey picture frame, smiling ever so slightly

秋风秋雨
Autumn winds and autumn rain

白发苍苍的父亲捧着你黑色的骨灰盒趔趄还乡
A white-haired father, holding the black urn with your ashes, stumbles home.

1 October 2014

Read more over at Nao blog.

~

Note: Those interested in more China-themed poetry might consider the Anthill.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

While most painters create their art using pen or brush, the avant-garde artist He Ling (@何玲Heling) uses medical syringes to bring his wild imaginings to life.

At his recent exhibition in Songzhuang Art District, the young artist displayed a series of mutant birds and beasts he created by injecting acrylic paints and dyes made from Chinese herbs into his canvas. The process resembles traditional embroidery in its delicacy.

Although He is a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, it’s not hard for the layperson to understand his unique artistic language. The combination of biological impossibilities with dreamy or nostalgic backgrounds creates an effect that is both terribly absurd and unusually familiar.

“Our ancestors and folk artisans expressed their understanding of the world – or their lack of understanding – using their imaginations,” He said. “Just look at the descriptions of some ‘species’ in the Shanhaijing,” a Qin Dynasty tome of myth.

“Modern people are rigid,” he said. “They think and behave according to their instructed rules and patterns. They have created a society that is spiritually divorced from natural inspiration.”

Through seemingly absurd images the young artist hopes to make viewers reflect on reality. In his work Yi Qin Tu, strange creatures such as bird-headed turtles, elephant-headed chickens and a combination of butterflies and bees call on viewers to consider pollution’s role in genetic mutation.

Another feature of He’s work is the comparison between human nature and animal instinct. Tong Wei Hu Sheng and Tong Wei Ma Qun depict the same theme – brutal cannibalism in the animal world – as well as more universal situations in human society.

“It is quite interesting to map human experiences onto the animals,” said Yang Wei, a local art critic. “Very often, when you compare a certain activity between human and animals, the former is much more absurd than the latter.”

He’s unique style comes more from experience than whimsy, said Duan Jun, vice president of White Box Gallery. Childhood images of mysterious and strange plants and animals stimulated He’s artistic impulse: the syringe enabled him to explore it.

He was born in 1981 in the remote mountains of Hunan province to three generations of village doctors. He spent most of his childhood in the family’s backyard clinic. Herbal medicine and old syringes were his toys.

“The pharmacy contained towering drawers full of exotic plants and other materials. Opening them was like being a little explorer. Some had dried leaves or colorful fruits. Some had roots or animal horns. Others were full of dead insects,” He said.

“It was a point of pride for me that I could find any medicine using its shape, color or smell when my mother assigned me to fetch something for a patient,” he said.

Apart from the playground of the pharmacy, various medical instruments were also He’s toys. Syringes were his favorite.

His sensitive blending of the natural and imaginary world has led China Culture Daily to term He’s avant-garde style “magical realism.”

But as a maverick and young artist, He tends to resist genre classification.

“Magical realism is a Latin American genre that had its heyday in the 1950s. Its historical context and expressive intent have no relationship with my work,” He said. “I am more concerned about whether my art can resonate with viewers than figuring out what I should label it.”

In addition to his needle paintings, He has also experimented with sculpture, performance and installation to express ideas and ask questions. He said he is looking for mediums that will allow him more chances for interaction rather than limiting himself to personal expression.

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

It’s hard to find anyone without an opinion about this city, be it a fear of pollution, heavy traffic or some other widely reported negative attribute.

But Beijing isn’t all bad.

Tasty snacks, magnificent architecture and a comparatively cosmopolitan environment are among the city’s selling points, which is what artist Tian Li attempts to capture in his work.

Tian’s paintings skip over human figures to focus on buildings. Majestic palaces, ancient city walls and narrow alleys dominate his canvas. Tian appears to love Beijing. Or to be more exact, he loves to paint Beijing.

Tian’s life experiences have greatly influenced his creative process. He followed his parents to Beijing from Liaoning province when he was 10 years old. Since then, he has spent most of his life in the city. After 50 years, he knows Beijing better than most natives.

His obsession comes at the cost of total exclusion of all other locations. “Art originates from life and should draw deeply on personal experience,” he said. An artist who plans to paint a city should live there for a long time to avoid missing its soul.

“I have traveled many beautiful places like Huangshan and Guilin. They are certainly amazing, but I’m not going to depict these places with the superficial eyes of a tourist,” he said.

It’s easy to find themes in Tian’s art. Reds and yellows – the colors of ancient palaces – dominate most of the pictures.

China regards red as a festive color and a symbol of dignity and luck. As early as 30,000 ago, ancient people began decorating their caves with red hues. After the Zhou Dynasty, Chinese palaces were mostly decorated with red.

As for the wide use of yellow, the color is tied to China’s search for its origins. Han civilization began in the Yellow River Valley by the loess plateau. Yellow has been the official color of imperial power and authority since the Han Dynasty: in feudal times it was reserved for use by the royal family.

Tian’s work is divided into block prints and oil paintings. Block prints make up most of his earlier work, though he has moved away from the medium due in part to its difficulty. Block printing is a medium of subtraction and requires the artist to start over completely to correct even minor mistakes, he said.

But the simple colors of block prints are perfectly suited to depicting Beijing’s hutongs – the antithesis of palace life. While the palace was a land of riches and luxury, the hutongs were humble dwellings associated with simplicity or poverty.

“Maybe in the future I will use wash painting to depict Beijing,” he said. Regardless of which medium he chooses next, it’s a safe bet that Tian’s sole subject matter will continue to be the city’s spirit.

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

Most people might not give Chinese posters a second thought, but Wang Yuqing has dedicated himself to collecting and studying them as historical records.

Often dismissed as propaganda, the posters reveal much about the social culture, economy and politics of modern Chinese history.

Archive of the Ages

Wang Yuqing maintains one of the largest collections of Chinese posters printed between 1912 and 1975, a staggering collection which offers insights into Old Shanghai life and the positive energy that followed the founding of New China.

His posters from Old Shanghai represent one of the first appearances of popular art in China. When the Qing Dynasty was forced to open Shanghai as a treaty port after the first Opium War (1840-1842), the city began modernizing at a breakneck pace.

The calendar pictures were originally created as advertisements for foreign commodities. Most feature beautiful young models with dates marked in both the Chinese and Gregorian calendars. The remainder of the poster area is used to introduce products.

Drawn by attractive young women, Shanghai’s residents embraced the calendars and quickly spread them to Chinese communities abroad.

The style, which depicts women with egg-white skin, was the invention of Chinese painter Zheng Mantuo. In 1914, Zheng applied watercolor painting techniques to create Wan Zhuang Tu, the first calendar picture. From then on, the brushwork was copied to develop more posters.

As the market evolved, the advertisements changed. Images of happy families replaced charming ladies in the Republican era. Eventually, the style faded from popularity and the painting techniques were lost, Wang said.

In the new era, the Old Shanghai calendars gave way to political posters with exaggerated features. In Huasheng Chuang, a fat boy is seen swinging on a massive peanut as a sign of agricultural abundance.

During the Great Leap Forward, the posters shifted from showing blissful liberated families to dependable workers and farmers.

Fading History

For various reasons, well preserved original posters are hard to come by. Most sold in the markets are modern fakes or copies that lose the stories that gave the propaganda context, Wang said.

To share his collection and the history behind the art, Wang held an exhibition at Beijing Dezi Art Center in June and July.

“At present, the price of these posters is not even close to their real value. I think one day the world will recognize their real value,” he said. As an accurate record of historical attitudes rather than circumstances, the posters represent an element that is often lost in historical studies.

Compiled over the last 24 years, Wang’s collection of nearly 4,000 posters offers a rare bridge to China’s recent past.

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Update, 7:26 pm: we got ahold of more posters:

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

Artists and writers seeking the pinnacle of Chinese civilization often turn to the Tang Dynasty, an era of openness and innovation credited with fostering some of the finest art and poetry in the history of Han civilization.

It’s no surprise that such an amazing era would provide similar inspiration to Xu Songbo, a professor at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, who attempts to capture the Tang spirit in his breathtaking oil compositions. They are collected in Tang Feng, his exhibition open until this Thursday at New Millennium Gallery in 798 Art District.

Xu focuses on the Tang Dynasty’s obsession with horsemanship and the hunt. Lin Yuan Ta Ge Tu depicts a well-dressed rider taking in the northern scenery. In Xia Ke Xing, a mounted archer searches for prey as his horse charges ahead.

Few creatures other than horses and humans make an appearance in Xu’s works. “I grew up in the 70s, and our generation had comic books instead of cartoons. Most of the comics told the stories of ancient dynasties, and the horse was the finest vehicle of the era,” he said. “Horses have been burned into my mind since childhood.”

But Xu’s works show as much of his own affinity for equines as the noble animal’s status in Chinese culture.

The horse arrived in China with the charioteers of the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BC). By 400 BC, they had become a symbol of prestige in addition to a tool of warfare.

Judging by idiomatic expressions, the horse is second only to the dragon among China’s beloved animals. A willful person is often compared to “having the vigor of a dragon or a horse,” and horses are said to pave the way to success. Some scholars even judge the success of ancient dynasties by the development of their horse culture.

“If we evaluate Tang by such criteria, it would be the heyday of the nation,” Xu said.

Tang rulers embraced the horse like no other Han-founded dynasty. The majority of cultural relics like the Six Steeds of the Zhao Mausoleum and Tri-color Horse prove that argument. Tang’s equine obsession has its roots in the Xianbei, an ancient group of Mongolic nomads who once dominated today’s eastern Mongolia, Inner Mongolia and Northeast China. Historical records show that the founders of Tang were Han Chinese generals who had been in the employ of the Xianbei state. As military men experienced in nomadic warfare, they brought the love of the horse to the imperial court.

Tang was one of the greatest powers in the world during its era, annexing many of its neighboring states and maintaining diplomatic relations with South and West Asian powers, the Abbasid Caliphate and a handful of European nations. For tributary states in the Tarim Basin or Transoxiana, fine steeds were a customary gift for the court.

The Tang Dynasty may have been the most cosmopolitan era in China history. Long noted for its religious tolerance and comparatively free exchange of cultures, Tang’s pluralism is something Xu attempts to reflect in his paintings. In Qiu Feng Jin, several of the men are depicted in the costume of other ethnic groups and wielding distinct weapons.

“As an artist, Xu uses positive energy to recast the zeitgeist of bygone eras in the perspective of modern people,” said Zhang Siyong, the curator. Xu previously explored traditional culture in his Chang Feng and Dao Wen series.

“When I was a little boy, the poems my teacher taught gave me an obscure impression about Tang,” Xu said. “I started to understand it better when painting comic books in university.” He continued his studies in the Mural Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Art.

But Xu’s attempt to recapture the spirit of Tang Dynasty is the result of an uncomfortable fact: Chinese culture is wandering further and further from its roots. Although many now recognize the importance of preserving China’s cultural roots, few take any meaningful action to preserve them.

Xu says Han costume fans and students of literature only preserve the shell of Chinese tradition while losing sight of its spirit. From his point of view, the spirit of traditional culture can be summed up as one of confidence, freedom, tolerance, wisdom, romance and initiative.

“It will take the effort of several generations to find our roots – the spirit of traditional culture,” Xu said.

New Millennium Gallery

Through October 16
Room 3818, 798 Art District, Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang
(010) 6432 4122
Free

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

The new documentary film Diamond in the Dunes, directed by Christopher Rufo (free streaming on PBS until September 8 for those with VPNs), tells the coming-of-age story of a Uyghur man named Parhat as he finds his way through college. It shows us how he and his Uyghur and Han classmates at Xinjiang University develop a passion for a game, for abilities and skills that don’t rely on ethnicity or Chinese business connections. It shows us how the citywide riots of 2009 shaped their life-paths and how they found ways to move forward despite the difficulties of their circumstances.

Parhat tells this story by showing us how he motivated his fellow players to think beyond themselves and their abilities to speak and act. Even though he lacks the words to fully express what he feels in Chinese, he tries; even though his team has little support and little training in how to play, they try.

Parhat knows what it means to experience feelings of lack — of not being good enough — but he also knows what it means to turn those same feelings into a source of motivation and courage.

Parhat feels as though many Uyghurs lack long-term vision and self-confidence; he feels as though many of them have internalized feelings of depression and defeat. Each new round of violence reverberates in ever widening rings of fear and distrust. Each diverted life drags the lives around it toward feelings of hopelessness and invisibility.

Yet it is by traveling through the “double consciousness” of not being “good enough” to be an ideal Chinese citizen and not being free to be “good enough” as a Uyghur baseball star that he comes to a realization about himself: that standing outside of mainstream Chinese society can also be a way of transcending the circumstances he’s been handed. By learning to be both Chinese and “foreign” at the same time, he can draw on energy that is not available to a person who is more comfortable.

It is on this point that we hear Parhat repeating the moral lesson that many Uyghurs have heard from other Uyghurs: if only Uyghurs would work as hard as other Chinese they would succeed. Parhat tells a struggling Uyghur teammate to just think about how clumsy the Han players looked when they first started, but that through their ambition and tenaciousness they have become competent players. What the film does not quite show us is the way other Uyghurs usually jump in at this point and argue that the lack of vision is simply a symptom of the lack of opportunities that are available to young Uyghurs. Limits on travel, hiring, communication, and education, and the structural violence of extreme poverty, all have a role to play in what a Uyghur might experience as being “less than” other Chinese. But, for Parhat, listing these complaints is just not enough — it describes the cards Uyghurs have been dealt, it doesn’t define how the game of life might be played.

Although the feelings of absolute difference and antagonism between Uyghurs and Han seem insurmountable, the common language of a game, of teamwork, strategy, and skill offers a tenuous bridge across this divide. Even more interestingly for Parhat and the other Uyghur players, it opens a door to another world. Baseball becomes a limiting case of what is possible. Like the physics Parhat studies in school, it becomes a problem that demanded a solution.

In the film, the analogy of baseball to broader social life seems heavy-handed — after all, it’s just a game — and the successes we see seem underwhelming. But the documentary does demonstrate that although broader contemporary social forces invade nearly every aspect of life, people still find ways to thrive. Perhaps the film’s narrative could do a bit more to convey the rawness of personal struggle that accompanies the drama of coming of age in Ürümchi.

Even more concretely, the film doesn’t show the viewer the way Parhat organized a Uyghur Little League. It doesn’t show the viewer how those young Uyghur kids were scouted by American Major League Baseball and the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan, and how in the years following the filming of the documentary some of them were given full-ride scholarships to play on top Chinese high school teams as they are being groomed for professional careers.

Yet, despite these narrative gaps, the documentary is rare (given the current circumstance in Xinjiang) in the way it develops long-term intimacy with its characters as they change over the years. The access Rufo was able to gain by framing the film around a seemingly innocuous game like baseball opens up the sweep of time in Ürümchi through the small dramas of life.

If you meet Parhat today you would quickly discover that he is still a gregarious, passionate man who tends to see absurd humor in the circumstances he has been handed. He still teaches anyone who asks how to throw a curve ball, how to love baseball, and how to embrace the possibilities of being a minor actor in a Chinese world. He still tries to tackle the problems of life in Ürümchi with the same tenacity he demonstrates in the film.

Since the film was shot a few years ago, the success of the baseball team has continued to grow. They went to the championship of the China Collegiate World Series in 2010 and 2011, where they defeated the reigning national champions from Guilin Liuzhuan Daxue 8:0.

Until September 8, the 53-minute documentary film can be streamed for free from PBS (VPN needed – US location).

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|