Ah, music festival season in China. With the balmy climes and fluffy white cottonwood pollen comes the annual rumor mill about which bold-faced recording artists are slated to perform at the summertime’s numerous annual kickoff events, which have been denied performance permits, and general conspiratorial grumblings about why this is and who's to blame.
Happy Passover and Easter weekend. We're launching our Three Shots With series tomorrow, starting with George Ding at 10 am, followed by Morgan Short at 2 pm. We'll see ya then.
Who are these girls? How did Donnie convince them to participate in this? How do we watch Shanghai play Beijing in women’s lacrosse? All questions one must ponder. The answer we’ve always know though: of course Donnie played lax for the Boston Cannons.
Once more unto the breach, eh, my friends… Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. A bit of a quieter one, actually, for that Beijing rock 'n' roll this weekend, compared to the last few weeks of busy stages and crowded schedules. Just a few good ones out there. PiL, of course, is playing over at Yugong Yishan, but you've probably already made your mind up about that. If you are going, you're familiar with the early flash hits of the band in the '80s -- "Rise," "This is Not a Love Song" and all that -- but in case you haven't had a chance yet, you should check out some of the new stuff from their comeback 2012 album This is PiL.
Peng Liyuan, who’s warming up to her role as China’s “First Lady” — a term that, lest you forget, has basically never been applied to the wives of Chinese leaders — is currently traveling with her husband in Africa as part of Xi Jinping’s first overseas trip as Chinese head of state, and it’d be... Read more »
Welp. T.G.I.F., Beijing Creampies, it's Friday and you know what that means: more musical obscura from Youku to wind down the work week and ring in the weekend.
Real special video this week. Real next-level shit. What we've got here is a new experimental psychedelic four-piece coming out of the countryside, currently tearing up the weibo with their fresh, free-form mix of Eastern and Western instrumentation and Influences.
Normal expat whining is grating and graceless, but let’s face it: it has its roots in something that we can all identify with.
China takes a lot out of you, demands a lot of you at times. Sure, there are those skating by with an absurd income-to-work ratio, people to whom China is a paid vacation punctuated by occasional encounters with the indigenous people who for some reason haven’t learned to speak English. But in any expat experience, there are certain unavoidable facts of life: you’re often out of your comfort zone, ostracized or just generally unable to make things happen.
Remember how long it took the Gangnam Style craze to make it to China, but when it got here it was, like, ridiculous?
Could we be seeing the same happening with Harlem Shake? This comes via The Nanfang's Cam MacMurchy, titled "Harlem Noodle Shake," produced by Shenzhenlocalmusic, promoting the Shenzhen's first hip-hop festival coming up on April 20. They really want this video to go viral, so help them out.
Li Hongbo loves paper. He loves it so much that he's taken it to the "artistic extreme," as Crane TV puts it -- which is apt, considering Li can "open" and "provoke" his paper art, turning/flipping/rotating it into different shapes or evocations. Check out this former book editor at work in the above video as he shapes paper gourds, guns, statues, and other miscellany.
