This piece originally appeared on the China digital media platform Radii, and this edited version is republished here with permission.

It’s the kind of balmy Sunday afternoon that makes you want a cold drink, and the Chinese street artist known as SHUO is taking me on a stroll through the hutongs after showing off one of his pieces.

“Did you see that?” he suddenly asks on our way to get milkshakes. A grin breaks out over his face. He says that I just missed an old lady on the street wearing an awesome shirt that said something about explosions. He’s very excited about the old lady’s awesome shirt and suggests that I write about awesome stuff like that. He doesn’t seem to be joking.

SHUO’s childlike excitement catches me off guard, if only because I expect him to be a little more cynical. The twenty-something 3D animator from Henan leads a quiet double life as an underground street artist in Beijing. He started off doing graffiti but moved onto stencil work — “I thought that stencil could express some things more easily, more concretely” — though he’s been playing around with cheaper and faster alternatives, like pasting stickers. His pieces are often deeply ironic takes on Chinese society, like this wheelchair-bound boy with his phone and charger stylized as an IV drip –

– or the URL http://www.china.com/ juxtaposed with a virus alert on a wall about to be knocked down:

SHUO is wearing white Converse sneakers, dark wash jeans, and a short-sleeved black t-shirt that doesn’t cover his tattoos. A pair of headphones is casually slung around his neck. One of his sleeves is streaked with dirt, as if he’d been scaling rooftops to put up his work — which is exactly what he did for the piece he just led me to see:

The weather-beaten blotch of paper above this Huguosi Xiaochi snack shop is one of his few extant pieces, too high up for sanitation workers to reach. It’s barely legible, a stencil of a pixelated Microsoft Word icon labeled  “个人简历” (“Personal Resume”). Last year, SHUO put up several of these around Beijing in a parody of the job application process, as if to comment on how hard it is for young Chinese like him to find employment.

Even the t-shirt SHUO’s wearing — self-designed, I learn — can be construed as a knowing jab at the new normal of air pollution. It’s embellished with a blown-up version of the green shield sticker found on the 3M face-masks commonly worn around Beijing.

The 3M motif appears elsewhere in his work, as in one piece where he superimposes a mask over a child’s face in a poster of an urban paradise with blue skies and green spaces:

In SHUO’s mind, it seemed to me at first, everything is ripe for this brand of dark humor.

I was surprised to learn that this isn’t quite the case.

“I don’t care about the law, I don’t care about other things, but my starting point is fun”

One is tempted to label SHUO the “Chinese Banksy.” Like the famous UK street artist, SHUO makes provocative stencil art behind a cloak of anonymity. But while Banksy’s choice to remain unidentified might have started out as a way to avoid prosecution, it now constitutes an important part of his identity; it’s both the mystique that makes his brand so appealing and a means of control over his public image.

For SHUO, anonymity is less of a choice: his work goes mostly unnoticed.

“Making these street art pieces, I’ve never been caught or chased, no one really cares about me. Even when doing it during the day, I don’t think it matters,” he says. (This isn’t completely true; he puts up a piece of work only if the coast is clear, as it were.) The fact that his work is always taken down or painted over doesn’t help, but he’s reluctantly accepted that his individual pieces are destined to be short-lived.

“Sitting on the street is boring,” he says. He wants more things — like his art, like that woman wearing that awesome shirt about explosions — to be fun.

SHUO’s “Personal Resume” on the wall of a Beijing subway station, before and after

The New Yorker referred to Bansky in a 2007 profile as “a sort of painterly Publius” who “surfaces from time to time to prod the popular conscience,” but SHUO couldn’t even prod the popular conscience if he wanted to. His art lingers in obscurity, both offline and online. “No one really pays attention to me. One friend of mine thinks it’s really weird, that in 2014, at my peak, I never took off, and after that the response just kept mellowing.”

Why is that? “I think it’s maybe that there are relatively few people doing [street art].” SHUO says he’s one of only two people in all of China making this kind of stencil art, as opposed to spray-paint graffiti, which is far more common. (The other artist, he says, is ROBBBB.) “First, [people] just don’t have the awareness. Second, they don’t know what this [kind of art] is. If they don’t know what something is, it’s really easy for them to ignore.”

“If the government says it’s reactionary, then it’s reactionary”

Offline, SHUO prefers to remain anonymous out of a sense of self-preservation. When he was in middle school, he went online and posted a question about rumors of Xinjiang people stabbing people on the street with needles to spread HIV. The next day, two police officers came to his house and told him he’d broken the law. They let him off because of his age, but the incident left a deep impression on him.

SHUO won’t post certain pieces for fear that the police will trace them to his home, as social media platforms like Weibo require real-name verification. Besides his graffiti friends, none of his acquaintances or family know him as a street artist. He doesn’t even sign his work, and says he doesn’t want it to attract too much attention. “Because I’m acting on my own, if I suffer one blow, I might just, disappear…” He trails off.

Perhaps the most important difference between an artist like Banksy and SHUO is what animates their work. A self-described “art terrorist,” Banksy creates tongue-in-cheek pieces that reek of anti-establishment sarcasm, such as his dystopian theme park Dismaland, a blockbuster critique of the Disney franchise. Banksy told The New Yorker in the 2007 profile, “I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.” In his art, the world is a big, bad joke, and although he might have run out of charity for it, he never tires of pointing out the punchline.

SHUO’s work can be much more ambiguous. He once put up a Wi-Fi sign outside of a police office — complete with the official logo — because every time he passed it, the officers inside were playing with their phones:

“It has the feeling of human warmth,” he says about the piece. “If you play with your phone, okay, I’ll give you Wi-Fi. It’s not that I’m criticizing you, not that I’m mocking you; it’s to make you feel more comfortable, I guess.”

His explanation triggers a kind of gestalt shift in how I view that work. Far from merely making fun of the police, he’s employing them in his little joke, and then sharing it with them. 

If Banksy-style sarcasm feels kitsch nowadays, it’s because it has become formulaic, and there isn’t much surprise to be found in reiterating the absurd. As hard as it might be to believe SHUO when he says his motives are innocent, his art is eye-opening in its capacity for both ridicule and earnestness, in its ability to appear sarcastic and yet still double back on itself to avoid descending into cynicism.

It is also completely his own. As he said in an interview with Beijing-based website Loreli in December 2015: “I’ll never stop, it’s part of my life. I have this problem that every time I take a picture of what I’ve done and put it online, everyone that comments just writes: Banksy. Just the word: Banksy. And I’m like, Dude, it took me ages thinking of the idea, I’ve finally had time to go paint it, can you not appreciate it?”

SHUO’s art is eye-opening in its capacity for both ridicule and earnestness, in its ability to appear sarcastic and yet still double back on itself to avoid descending into cynicism

In SHUO’s worldview, dark humor can be light. One of his more sensitive pieces saw him inserting the letters A, B, and C onto a poster touting “socialist core values,” turning it into a multiple-choice question:

The piece raises questions about whether all of these values can feasibly coexist, or whether some, like democracy, are more important than others in Chinese society.

He thinks it’s harmless, though he sees the friction between different interpretations. “If you use a different logic, like in real society, some things are very harmful. Like the ABC piece, if the government says it’s reactionary, then it’s reactionary. But if I tell my other friends I’m making a joke, I think it’s pretty funny. It’s very ambiguous.”

Real society exists in tension with SHUO’s society. “I think society is a really fun game, and you can freely play this game,” he says. “But if you think according to this principle, it’s actually pretty crazy, pretty chaotic, because…” He trails off over his chocolate milkshake, collecting his thoughts. “I don’t care about the law, I don’t care about other things, but my starting point is fun. I don’t want to hurt people.”

The other day, SHUO says, he was talking with a friend about how they could make society feel more like a community. Everyone could feel like neighbors, like a big family. If he saw someone he didn’t know on the street and liked their clothes, he would feel comfortable complimenting them, without fear of misunderstanding.

I ask SHUO if he’s ever done anything like that. After all, he didn’t tell that old lady we’d seen earlier on the street that he liked her shirt.

“No,” he laughs. “I was just talking about it with my friend. We thought it would be fun if we could do that.”

It’s only a hypothetical. But his street art? It’s very real, and very fun.

This piece was published on Radii. Most of the photos above were taken with permission from SHUO’s (private) Flickr account, with some first appearing on Loreli.

Megan Pan is a writer and undergraduate at Northwestern University majoring in Philosophy and double-minoring in Poetry and Chinese.

This latest China-based production of the comedy is not about money, stars, or even an Expat in Chinese Film and TV Award: It’s about the art. To learn more, and help shift some tickets, Beijing Cream had a quick chat with the cast of this 90-minute modernist comedy about “three people losing their shit over a painting” (curtains rise 7.30pm on Thursday; tickets 100 kuai).

Beijing Cream: (stroking chin) So why Art?

Carlos Ottery (actor, Yvan): A screenwriter pal of mine, Peter, wanted to direct the play in Beijing a few years ago but it fell through, as these things often do… putting it on at has been at the back, the very back, of my mind for quite a while.

Gregory Joseph Allen (director/actor, Marc) From the very beginning this has really been all about a small group of like-minded artists falling in love with a script and wanted to share it with others. Oh, and chicks dig theatre nerds… they do, right? Right? I hope that I didn’t just waste three months of my life. Shit.

BJC: Why are there so few small indie productions, like Art, in Beijing?

CO: Money. Unless you are talking about a big Broadway-style show or a particularly commercial performance, theatre makes bugger-all cash. These days a lot of people in Beijing are in things for the money alone…People prefer to lose 10 million dollars on a film that will never get made, or to watch something with Vin Diesel topless, and who can blame them for that.

The other thing is censorship, which seeps in everywhere. It effects everything: public discourse, books, TV, theatre. Who can be arsed putting on a good show, only to be told at the last minute that the censors want you to change things, due to some imagined sensitivity?

GJA: Because producing a play of any kind is really fucking hard to do, dude. I am only kind of kidding… There is just a lot involved in the putting-together of a play intended for public presentation, and unless you are really passionate about what you are doing, it’s hard to justify all of the time and work that it takes to get it done. Also, there are only so many theatre-loving expat actors in Beijing… Most of the quality actors that I know are trying to pay the bills by gigging in the local film and television market. They don’t really have the luxury of taking the time to do a play.

But is it Art? Greg’s knitted vest raises challenging questions

BJC: What are the cast’s theatrical bona fides – other than being three out-of-work chaps who can speak English?

CO: Ha. You have got me down. Even when I am gainfully employed, which I occasionally am, people still seem to think I am out of work. I think it something to do with the way I dress.

Greg is a good one to deconstruct. He played American football in his youth and he has that build, a cross between a drill sergeant and a bouncer. Yet at the same time, he strides around rehearsals quoting Shakespeare soliloquies… he lives and breathes theatre. He’s done hundreds of Equity performances, talks endlessly about Chekov and Stanislavsky, that sort of thing. Basically, if the show comes anywhere close to being remotely professional, then it is all down to him.

GJA: Stand back, bitches, and let the tootin’ begin… I have been acting for about 40 years. I have been in over 100 stage productions of one kind or another. I have a B.A. in Theatre Arts, and an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts: Acting and Directing. I have spent the last six years teaching theatre at Tsinghua International School, and since arriving in China I have had the pleasure of acting in several locally produced films [note Gregory’s role as “American Prick” in last year’s Jackie Chan-Jonny Knoxville flick Skiptrace– Ed]. And if you have ever wondered, yes, it is pretty fucking cool to see your big-ass head on an IMAX screen.

CO: Then there’s Sam [Kamanguza, who plays Serge]. A very cool character indeed. Ice-cold. My complete opposite on the stage. I’m all nerves, jangling around, barely able to stand still, and Sam will just stand opposite me and toss out his lines, like someone out of an old cowboy movie. Maybe inside he is all jittery and faking it, but I don’t think so. Funny too – has some great stories about guys in urinals standing next to him to, erm, check him out. Wonder how controlled he is then.  

BJC: Have you paid much attention to the recent Art revival in London?

CO: I saw the three ‘actors’ give an interview on Youtube. One of them was talking about what a great job he had done with his lines, and I remember thinking, ‘the smug git’ – only because I have had such a struggle with learning mine, obviously.

GJA: A couple of my colleagues had the pleasure of seeing it recently. They had nothing but praise for it. If we can deliver anything even near to what they are sharing on the east end, I would consider our production a success.

What particular relevance (if any) will Art hold for a Beijing audience?

CO: These days, China is famed for people paying millions of dollars on art of very questionable value. The play certainly taps into that. There’s also a lot of stuff about the getting rid of the old, to replace it with stuff that is ‘modern’, for no real reason other that the sake of it. I know Beijingers will be able to understand that.

For me the play is really about three blokes arguing to the death over something (seemingly trivial), simply because they have known each other for so long that they can. I think people can relate to that anywhere…

(L-R) Sam Kamanguza, Carlos Ottery and Gregory Joseph Allen play Serge, Yvan and Marc

BJC: What difficulties did you face mounting the play in China? Did you at any point find yourself wishing to punch a nearby wall?

CO: Getting ‘official approval was a problem… our producer was able to pull some strings with the relevant departments at the last minute and rush things through. Fortunately, three blokes losing their shit over a painting isn’t deemed a sensitive issue.

GJA: Producing a play anywhere usually produces a few “wall punch” worthy moments, but our process has been relatively stress free… I wouldn’t be surprised if we sent a few walls to the emergency room before it is all said and done.

CO: It’s put me off producing for life. When it is all over, am gonna switch off my phone, and spend a week in my bed doing nothing but drinking cider, and eating sandwiches. Whilst theatre is a mild passion, what I really like to do is make sandwiches. Recently, I have been experimenting with homemade shish kebabs. I get some lamb skewers from a local Xingjiang place, make my own chilli sauce, throw it in a tortilla from the supermarket: Less stressful than theatre production. And cheaper

A homemade kebab, courtesy of Carlos

ART runs from May 11-13, 7.30-9pm/ May 14, 2.30-4pm (100 RMB/ Students 70 RMB) at Penghao Theatre. Photo credits: Sophia Wong

Last weekend I went to Gulsay Cemetery at the south end of Ürümchi, back behind the power plants right next to the lowest foothill of the eastern section of Heavenly Mountains. Many Uyghur, Kazakh, and Hui heroes are buried in this cemetery; people often just refer to it as “the Muslim cemetery.” Looking at the markings around you, it feels as though you are in a completely Muslim world. In the Uyghur section of the cemetery all of the signs are only in the Arabic script of modern Uyghur. There is little sign in this community of the dead that we’re in the largest Chinese city in Central Asia.

A few hundred meters away you can recognize how the city reaches even this last stop on the 308 bus line — giant earth-moving machines prowl the nearby city landfill, sunlight reflects off of the CITIC tower at Little West Gate — but the people here still seem at rest in the earth.

Looking through the Uyghur photographer Ali K.’s 2013 project “Burial,” a viewer gets a similar feeling. Writing about the project, Ali K. said his original intention was “to create a cautionary visual representation of customs that had not yet fallen to the wayside.” He wanted to note the way the many phenomena of Uyghur faith remain embedded in the present life practices of urban Uyghurs. His sense was that many practices, particularly in burial, are related to quite ancient ideas about the way “the earth is the source of meaning.”

To his thinking, the way Uyghurs still plant trees, insert flags, or tie strips of cloth to tree branches is related to the practices derived from the belief systems that predate the overlay of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Islam.

There is a gritty darkness to Ali K.’s images. The images are underexposed in shades of deep gray. There is a rough graininess to many of them which adds to the feeling of blurriness and sorrow. Figures bent in grief and exhaustion form dark figures against the snow and dust. Grave markings which are built out of care by the families of the dead stand in sharp relief against the sky and high-tension electric wires. There is a murkiness to the images which draws the viewer in and makes them enter a mood of contemplation mixed with sorrow. What does it mean to rest in peace?

Ali K. says that now when he walks in the cemetery he “feels free from anxiety,” but that Uyghur cemeteries were also a space where he came to terms with his own specific relationship to tradition and culture. He began the series in June 2010 after his mother died, but already he had been thinking about his own position in the Uyghur world. Since he was trained in Chinese language schools his whole life and has spent the majority of his life in a northern suburb of Ürümchi where Uyghurs make up a very small part of the population, Ali K. has always felt detached.

He said: “For a while I had a serious identity crisis (Who am I? Where do I come from?). In 2009 I went to Beijing and when I returned I had a desire to look into the source of my own culture… at the same time, for me, the cemetery is also dedicated to my mother.”

This series is thus his attempt to come to terms with his own place in the Uyghur world. Like his 2014 “Nan” photo series he is placing his own position in relation to a history of the present. He buried his mother in one of these cemeteries and now he is looking for his own place on the edge of a Chinese city under the shadow of the power plants and the lower reaches of the Heavenly Mountains.

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|

The first Uyghur contemporary art exhibition was launched at Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum on May 16, attended by several hundred people from across the province, including most of the represented artists. Since the majority of the painters were teachers or professors, many leading administrators from local universities were also present. Aside from them and a few Han painters from local art schools that the museum’s leading curator, Zeng Chunkai, had invited for the opening, nearly everyone was Uyghur. Even a famous Uyghur public intellectual, Yalkun Rozi, came and praised the artists – although he clearly didn’t understand contemporary art.

Everyone I spoke with was thrilled by the opening. Several viewers were amazed to see Uyghurs given voice in a professional contemporary art space. Just seeing their work on the wall was a major thing. The artists I spoke with felt as though the exhibition — which will last until June 16 — was a turning point in the Uyghur contemporary art scene. To them it presaged greater recognition and further development outside of Xinjiang and into the world.

Actually the exhibition was made possible by an earlier one in Berlin, which included many of the pieces shown in Ürümchi. That show gave a group of five Uyghur artists an opportunity to travel to Europe, show their work, and become acquainted with the European art scene. They were given the confidence to later join the Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum exhibition.

Although organizers received some push-back for not including Han artists, the show was allowed to go forward. (And to be fair, Han artists’ group exhibitions rarely include Uyghur artists.) This might have been due in part because of the exhibition’s diversity – several female Uyghur artists and non-Uyghur minority artists are included — and because of the artists’ previous success in Europe.

At the opening, much of the commentary revolved around what made art “contemporary” or “modern.” Many of the Uyghur artists had difficulty distinguishing between the two, but to a curator like Zeng it was an important distinction. For him modern art is uncompelling because it is derivative of earlier works or styles. Of course, it’s interesting to see a Uyghur artist in conversation with someone like Gustav Klimt, but for Zeng it doesn’t push the boundaries of what can be represented far enough.

“Waiting” by Ablikim Ghini

One of the leading Uyghur artists, Dilqun Ghazi, said much of the same thing at a reception following the opening. “What makes something contemporary?” he asked. “I’m a contemporary person. I’m living right now. But that is not the same thing as contemporary art.”

He went on to say that to be contemporary, art had to meet certain criteria:

First, it has to be consciously in relationship with the art that came before it. “What we call contemporary art just began in the 1980s, so we need to be aware of what has been painted over the past 30 years,” he said.

Second, and for him most importantly, “contemporary art needs to be an expression of an individual’s idea.” It can’t pander to an audience or borrow its style from some other painter.

Ghazi, who is the son of the pioneering painter Ghazi Exmet, mentioned that, over the past decade or so, Uyghur painters have developed an affinity for painting thousand-year-old houses using the same palate over and over again. He felt that they have decided certain shades of brown and beige are beautiful. He also noted that Xinjiang painters have also gotten used to signaling their subject matter by putting a doppa on their subjects. This seemed lazy to him, and was a clear indicator of a painting that was not really contemporary. “Actually, what we take to be traditional painting is really just modern art,” he said. “For us modern art was where tradition comes from.”

Another painter, Dilmurad Abdukadir, spoke up at this point to talk about his own work and how he doesn’t really care about his audience. What was most important to him was whether or not he himself was happy. He said that, if he starts worrying about whether or not his paintings have “ethnic characteristics,” he starts to limit himself. If he just stays within his own mind though, he feels “limitless.” This gives him a kind of freedom in his painting to paint toward the affect of his inner world. For him, painting becomes a release.

Untitled by Dilmurad Abdukadir

The painters were all intrigued by a Uyghur painter from a nearby town called Changji who goes by the pseudonym Ali K. His work focuses on the dreams of children and how they are shifting under global capitalism. Although he is clearly focused on Uyghur subjects – the school children at the middle school where he teaches — his themes were quite contemporary.

Over the course of the evening, other Uyghur artists peppered him with questions regarding his process and how he came to his current place in regards to contemporary art. For them, what stood out about his work was not only its aesthetics, but also its message: a commentary on the contemporary world and the endless commodification of everything around us, and a meditation on what is going on in the minds of children at this moment when everything that had appeared solid is melting away. Even naan, a staple of the Uyghur diet for more than 1,000 years, is now being commodified and sold on Taobao.

“Naan” by Ali K.

A painter named Bakhtiyar Abdurahim, one of the organizers of the exhibition, said that what they are painting needs to come out of the experience of urban living. It must reflect the changes they themselves are facing. As Dilkhun Razi put it: “What we are painting now is not merely an ‘ethnic spirit’ but the ‘spirit of our grandchildren.’”

By Xinjiang standards, the exhibition has already been a tremendous success. A group of Uyghur artists is participating in a space that has up to this point been the domain, nearly exclusively, of Han artists. Now their images are being seen by the wider cultural community. Shows like this build confidence. They amplify the visions of people not usually noticed. Even the Party Secretary of the Province, Zhang Chunxian, is coming to see the show. Uyghur contemporary art is now officially alive.

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|

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.

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On February 5, 1989, at the opening of the China Avant-Garde Exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, a young performance artist by the name of Xiao Lu fired two gunshots at her work, two telephone booths with figures engaged in conversation inside. Her act — part of the performance piece titled “Dialogue” — became synonymous with the exhibition, caused the entire show to be temporarily shut down, and contributed to her and her boyfriend’s arrest.

Madeline Eschenburg and Ellen Larson, both curators and students of Chinese contemporary art (and editors Open Ground Blog), are with us today to discuss this seminal moment in Chinese contemporary art. They are also the moderators of a Bookworm Literary Festival event on Sunday, March 29 called The Female Voice in Chinese Contemporary Art, a panel discussion featuring Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art in Beijing; Sun Shaokun, who explores her body in relation to nature; and the aforementioned Xiao Lu.

The panel was assembled by Mojdeh Shiek, a Bookworm Literary Festival organizer and special cohost of this episode, joining regular host Anthony Tao (disclosure: also a Bookworm Literary Festival organizer).

Together, they discuss issues ranging from live sex performances (art?) to the evolution of contemporary Chinese art (meaning?), from the “apartment art” of the 1990s to commercial art to art’s response to commercialism, and how the cycle is ever-fluid.

The Creamcast would like to thank Popup Chinese for letting us use their studio and Great Leap Brewing for their generous support.

Download Episode 17 of The Creamcast here, or listen to it on iTunes.

Related Episodes: Episode 16, Bookworm Literary Festival preview; Episode 18, JUE Festival

|The Creamcast Archives|

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

Few things can poison an artist’s development quite like early fame. And when fame comes knocking, it takes a lot to cast it away and reboot one’s art career in an unfamiliar world. Illustrator Lisk Feng made that tough decision three years ago when she left her hometown behind to build her skills and begin a new career in the US.

Feng was born and grew up in Haining, Zhejiang province. Her mother, also an artist, encouraged Feng to study violin, clarinet and choir as a child.

“But I found illustration was my true love,” she says. “After passing the entrance exam for senior high, I started to play an online doodling game and found the fun of painting. I gave up my violin and online games to embrace art.”

A combination of natural talent and dedicated practice brought Feng to the attention of the art community, and she began to serialize her illustrations in teen magazines. She published Tong, her first album of paintings, while still a sophomore in 2011.

Known for her warm and sweet style and moving stories, Feng won loads of adolescent fans. In the following two years, she was busy with autographs sessions for her albums.

“People were already calling me an influential and successful illustrator, but that label really confused me,” Feng says. The approval and economic independence showed her what could succeed in China.

“But at the same time, I felt like a machine rather than an artist who poured her energy into creating better works,” she says.

For Feng, saying goodbye to her past “success” and starting an art journey in a new environment was the best way to grow. After graduating from China Academy of Fine Arts, Feng flew to Baltimore to pursue a master’s of fine art in Illustration of Practice at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Compared to the dreamy and delicate style of her earlier works, Feng’s work since arriving in the US has become concise and ironic.

In her 2013 series Flowers and Girls, Feng invites viewers into the soft inner world of modern females. While flowers may be a source of happiness for a young girl, a mature woman cares more about whether or not she is more gorgeous than the flowers.

In one of her editorial cartoons published in the New York Times, Feng depicts the dilemma of digital technology and the Internet. In the picture, PCs, TVs, smartphones and tablets surround a tall man who kneels on ground while attempting to deal with life and work at the same time. The ludicrous scene is the norm in the digital age, and Feng’s concise representation makes viewers question whether digital technology can really simplify people’s lives.

Feng also hoists up herself as the star of her creations. In “Fat Ladies,” Feng records her free life in the US and how she learned to accept and appreciate her own beauty as an overweight woman.

“I was mocked by lots of mean men because of my weight. I often wore men’s clothes to hide my low self-esteem. Now I’m confident enough to face my weight and use my works to tell other fat ladies that they can be gorgeous,” Feng says.

Finding her confidence may be Feng’s biggest change since living abroad. After graduating from MICA in Baltimore last year, Feng moved to New York to work as a freelance illustrator.

The competitive environment has put her through bouts of depression, but Feng has become a regular contributor to mainstream media since getting her first editorial cartoon published in Fast Company Magazine last August.

“Unlike China, where illustration is a low position, it seems everyone in New York loves illustrations. You can see them in advertisements, subways and on the covers of many novels,” she said.

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.

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.

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.

A rifle and sword tied with a red flag over a meter of Gobi sand welcomes visitors to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Museum in the city of Shihezi, 136 kilometers northwest of Ürümchi. This museum, filled with patched and dented artifacts and hundreds of large-scale historical photos, is the premier monument to the Han experience of the recent past in Xinjiang. It shows us the narrative of experience necessary to understand the history of the people who self-identify as “constructors” (jianshezhe) of Xinjiang.

The Bingtuan, as the Corps is referred to by locals, is a state-sponsored farm system spread across the territory of Xinjiang — an area as large as California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico combined. Hundreds of regiments are still in operation 60 years after their founding. Out of this population of around 3 million military farmers, 90 percent are Han.

The exhibition begins with giant images of people (at that point, in the early 1950s, mostly men) tilling the soil by yoking themselves together in the place of horses or tractors. The mission of these rehabilitated Guomindang soldiers and reassigned members of the People’s Liberation Army was to claim the soil for agriculture. They dug ditches, carrying away dirt in wheelbarrows; they carried bricks on their backs and “ate bitterness.”

The museum highlights the heroism of these people. In a material illustration of Lei Feng’s sacrificial spirit it shows us the patched coats and socks of these military farmers. Combined with the visceral images of brave suffering in frigid desert winters, these artifacts drive home how extreme the conditions were. We are invited to consider the way water was drunk from dented canteens. Through a wax, wood, and earth diorama we see how the first settlers lived in subterranean rooms dug out of the desert floor.

There are images of families, of school children, of choral groups singing Red Songs; there are images of new waterways, of giant vegetables, of new cities. In an elliptical way the exhibit highlights the features that often dominate Western retellings of this history. There is an alcove dedicated to the poet Ai Qing, the famous father of the infamous Ai Weiwei. There are images of Ai with famous intellectuals; a few lines of his verse, but there is little explanation of why he was exiled in the late 1950s to a penal colony within the Bingtuan apparatus.

Even more interesting is a brief retelling of the story of the teenage brides from Shanghai that were rusticated to Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of Shanghaiers were sent to work on Bingtuan farms in the early 1960s. All of these stories of struggle and hardship deserve our attention, but the story of forced marriage of young women to soldier farmers are perhaps the most poignant. Rather than being given military status, these teenagers were relegated to “housewife” status (jiashugong). By not granting them the salary and pension of their male counterparts while at the same time blocking their means of return to their hometowns, this policy forced women toward marriage and thus security. The exhibit invites the viewer to consider this story and highlights the way these women still feel the effects of this reshaping of their lives by showing us images of contemporary reunions of Xinjiang’s Shanghai girls.

The exhibit ends with an accounting of what has changed in the reform period. All the way through the 1980s Bingtuan farmers were desperately poor. Although they were government employees, the children of Bingtuan farmers often felt they were being born into a life sentence of hard labor. Unlike the flexibility and nominal autonomy of farmers with generic rural household registration or the privilege of those with urban status, those with Bingtuan status often experienced a predetermined life course in which one’s labor was not his or her own. Whole families lived on monthly salaries of 40-50 yuan.

But in the mid-1990s, for-profit oil and gas industries arrived along with new infrastructure and national and transnational markets. Today, the Bingtuan has eight publicly traded subsidiary companies that specialize in information technology, plastics, international trade, alcohol, paper, electricity, and cement, in addition to more traditional products such as cotton, tomatoes, fruit, and sheep. The exhibit highlights how bright the future looks for the children of a secure Xinjiang Bingtuan.

The marginalization of national minorities haunts the narrative of the Bingtuan’s transformation of Xinjiang. Uyghurs appear on the sidelines watching demonstrations of new technologies for turning land into communal farms. They are shown applauding the arrival of great ditches across their land. They sit on the sidelines of Bingtuan heroism.

The museum — telling the story of how Xinjiang was made and what it has become — is free and open to the public.

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|

Last September, when Literary Death Match swung through Beijing, I performed a poem called Things That Taste Like Purple about the devilry of baijiu, a.k.a. sorghum liquor (dust of the attic, wine of the gutter… with a long finish into the fetor of fragrance). Unbeknownst to me, one of my friends in the audience, the artistic and talented Amy Sands, would go on to create a series of watercolors to accompany my words. The video, which she shot, I post here with deepest gratitude and humility.

UPDATE: You can now read the poem over at Kartika Review.

“…the opening of Symphonie Espagnole…”

If you enjoyed this, I highly recommend checking out the collaboration between former US poet laureate Billy Collins and JWT-NY, which hired animators to illustrate such poems as The Dead, Forgetfulness, and Now and Then (which has a China theme, for what it’s worth).