The nunchucks are an unnecessary touch, turning a cheesy, goofily syncopated music video into a stupid Balls of Fire ripoff. Actually, this whole thing is stupid. So, so stupid.
For those of you who have been watching, The Sound Stage has been working in a "series within a series" every other episode or so since last November, featuring bands from our trip to Wuhan. AV Okubo is the last of those bands.
It takes a bit of commitment to get to Three Shadows Photography Centre, which, outside Fifth Ring Road, counts as "far outside the city." And once you arrive, you very well could get lost on the train tracks before finally coming to the main building. But there's a simple answer to the question of whether it's worth journeying out there to check out the current exhibition: yes.
Although the use of hashish has been a part of the Uyghur pharmacopeia for centuries, drugs appear to have become a widespread problem for Uyghurs in the early 1990s. It was only then that young men in their twenties began dying of overdoses and needle-borne disease. As Ilham Tohti mentioned in 2011, in the intervening decades drugs, along with theft, pickpocketing, trafficking, and prostitution, “have gotten so bad that our entire ethnic group is suddenly perceived as a crime-prone community.” These are issues which Uyghurs discuss among themselves and feel embarrassed about when they are raised among outsiders.
After a decade abroad in the New York art scene, painter Zhao Gang is back to exhibit his last decade of creations.
The exhibition, which opened April 13 in Yonghe Community, has attracted art market observers, commentators, reporters, and general art lovers.
Titled “The Emperor and His…,” the paintings capture Zhao’s impressions about people around the world.
Brian Yang, who produced the 2012 documentary Linsanity (directed by Evan Jackson Leong), is in Beijing for the Beijing International Film Festival, which means now's a good time as any to remind everyone that you can watch his 88-minute doc for free on iQiyi (embedded above; just turn off your VPNs, China people).
A receptionist at the Wangfujing Branch of China’s Commercial Publishing House got the surprise of her life when an old man walked in with a several-thousand-page handwritten manuscript.
At 76-years-old, Che Hongcai had only one thing to say: “I’m finished.”
In his hands was the first ever Pashto-Chinese dictionary, a project commissioned, re-commissioned and eventually lost by the State Council.
DC rappers Pacman and Peso, who made waves in January after releasing a music video filmed in Pyongyang, North Korea (a trip that their friend and colleague, Ramsey Aburdene, documented for this site), are back with another video, this one set in Beijing. There's a lot to love about this, including:
The world is slowly discovering that the Chinese music landscape is not limited to folk tunes and revolutionary ballads. As China’s indie rock, blues and trip-hop artists head abroad, avoiding the “Made in China” label has become a major concern.
