Of all the performers in the upper echelon of Uyghur pop music, Möminjan is perhaps the most widely traveled independent artist. Möminjan and his brother, the famous composer Ablet Ablikim, grew up in the shadow of their famous uncle Abdulla, the King of Uyghur pop. He and his brother have been following in their uncle’s footsteps for more than a decade; they even recorded a song together called “We Brothers” (Qerindash Biz), which sounds a bit like a Uyghur version of the Everly Brothers.
This video begins with the text: "After his video 'Donnie Does Marriage Market' went viral in China, Donald Mahoney was invited to Beijing to be a guest on the popular Chinese TV show: My Oscar."
That's quite the set-up. But Donnie struggles, privately, with a crisis of confidence -- before finding himself amidst firecracker smoke. At the 10-minute mark, he goes on stage. It gets awkward real fast.
Ablajan Awut Ayup, the Uyghur Justin Bieber, is trending again in Uyghur cyberspace. Uyghur Weixin and popular social media sites like Misranim have amped up Ablajan’s meteoric rise in Uyghur pop culture, but this time it’s not just his highly orchestrated K-pop-style dance-ensemble performances, his catchy rhymes and bad-boy persona. Ablajan is crossing over. China, meet A-bo-la-jiang.
Xu Xin’s monumental 2010 film, Karamay (below, with English subtitles), is a meditation on the relationship humans have to failures within Modernist political projects in our current historical moment. Using long-takes and repetitive framing, Xu Xin draws out the long duration of trauma and feelings of injustice following a horrific fire that killed hundreds of children in 1994. With the exception of a minority of Uyghurs and Kazakhs, the majority of Mandarin speakers featured in this award-winning 356-minute film came from elsewhere.
Wei Gensheng is a professional crane operator. Maybe he should think about changing professions, because these pictures are breathtaking, probably the best we've seen of Shanghai's skyline. Wei won second prize at the Shanghai City Photography Competition with these, which were snapped 2,000 feet (610 meters) above ground on the Shanghai Tower. (The building will be the world's second tallest, behind the Burj Khalifa, when it's completed later this year.)
I've been interested in Chinese rap for a long time, not only because rap's traditional focus on social problems and dirty lyrics seem to clash with Chinese political constraints, but linguistically the Chinese language has so many homonyms and rhymes one would think rapping would have endless variety. Unfortunately, there hasn't been a rapper guest on The Sound Stage... until now.
