Women in China are covertly resisting government crackdowns on discussions over their Me Too movement with a clever workaround.
The phrase “rice bunny” (米兔), pronounced as “mi tu,” has popped up on social media networks after censors removed posts that mentioned sexual harassment or the hashtag #MeToo. While those phrases are heavily monitored, Rice Bunny isn’t.
Sebastián Mahaluf stands out as an artist deeply engaged in weaving the complex threads of human connection, community, and the interplay of personal and collective experiences. His notable work, "CONTRADICTION AND TENSION," showcases his approach to art as a participatory experience that bridges individual perceptions with communal narratives.
In the south-western city of Chengdu, by all accounts a city on the edge coping with heavy pollution but also with authorities scrambling to put a lid on simmering discontent. That night police detained a number of artists who managed to stage a silent demonstration, while wearing face masks.
Protests erupted in cities and on campuses across China this weekend as frustrated and outraged citizens took to the streets in a stunning wave of demonstrations against the government’s “zero covid” policy and the leaders enforcing it.
"May you live in interesting times" is the familiar Chinese saying, usually spat out as a curse. You can see why in "A Touch of Sin," a film by renowned director Jia Zhang-ke. That kind of time is now, in the history of his country. With four vignettes inspired by real-life "ripped from the headline" events, he shows what the great economic expansion of China is doing to the majority of its people.
Xiao Lu was one of the most influential women in contemporary Chinese art, better known for provoking performance art works and sharp social commentaries. Her works address sensitive social and cultural issues that counter mainstream attitudes and values. In 1989, she put her work "Dialogue" up for exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing.
Leilei Zhang was harassed on a public bus when a man gripped her hand, glared at her and refused to let go. With the determination to raise public awareness, Leilei began a crowd-funding campaign to raise money for what could have been China's first public anti-sexual harassment advertisement. She approached the authorities of her home city, Guangzhou, but it did not want to take on the advertising for fear it would panic the public.
Lu Yang attempts to bring the negative notion of Cancer cell into a “Kimo Kawa” object of love and/or pain and hopes to open a dialogue that brings awareness to the acceptance and tolerance of living with cancer cells.
Photographer Sim Chi Yin spent more than three years documenting a Chinese gold miner who is suffering from the deadly lung disease silicosis. Despite the odds, his loving relationship with his wife has kept him alive much longer than anyone expected.
Students at art colleges across China are taking a strong stance in the midst of the largest wave of protests to have gripped the country since 1989. As demonstrations against the government’s strict Covid-19 policies erupted across the country over the weekend, students rallied on campuses to create protest art and graffiti.
Shortly after the close of this year’s International Women’s Day, China’s Twitter-like service Sina Weibo shut down Feminist Voices. With 180,000 followers, the group’s social media account was one of the most important advocacy channels for spreading information about women’s issues in China, but in an instant, it was gone. A few hours later, the private messaging app WeChat also shuttered an account for the group.
Nanfu Wang feels safe in New York. Surveillance, that essential preoccupation of the documentarian in America, is a chokehold from which she has been temporarily released. From her Brooklyn apartment, the Chinese filmmaker prepares for the release of her debut feature documentary, Hooligan Sparrow.
In 2016, Zhou Zhenfeng, who was a student at a college in Hebei at the time, discovered that there were a lot of waste tires in the streets and alleys. Zhou Zhenfeng learned that tires are made of infusible or refractory polymer elastic materials. It takes hundreds of years for these materials to decompose in the soil to the extent that they do not affect the growth of plants.
Whose Utopia? was made by the Chinese artist Cao Fei and filmed at the OSRAM lighting factory in Foshan in the Pearl River Delta in southern China during 2005 and 2006. It was commissioned as part of a project entitled ‘What Are They Doing Here?’ that was run by the Siemens Art Program from 2000 to 2006 and involved Chinese artists undertaking six-month-long residencies at industrial facilities across the country.
Sima Qian: China's 'grand historian' By Carrie Gracie BBC News, Beijing
Speaking truth to power has always been a high-risk strategy in China. Its rulers tend to prefer flattery, and writers who forget this do so at their peril. China's "grand historian" - 2,000 years ago - was one of many who have paid a terrible price.
Zheng Xi 郑熹, a Ph.D. candidate with a focus on gender studies at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Zheng has launched a campaign asking city governments around China to display anti-sexual-harassment logos, complete with a groper’s “salty-pig hand” visual (etymological context here), alongside other commonly displayed public safety logos on places like subway trains and buses.
The 9,000 bottles of water on display at an art gallery in Beijing last month appeared identical to those of Nongfu Spring, one of China’s most popular spring water brands, with one jarring difference. Inside each bottle was brown, murky groundwater collected from a Chinese village.
On November 26, 2012, about ten college students “flash mobbed” the front of the human resources and social welfare department of Hubei Province in central China. "Refuse to take off pants for inspection," "Ask about menstrual history, what does it have to do with being a civil servant." According to the current admission regulations, female candidates for civil service positions must go through a detailed gynecological examination.
Two pairs of dusty, pastel-orange roller skates. A ram's skull. Several meters of tangled, bright red rope. They aren't the sort of items you'd find in the great fashion houses of Europe or on North American catwalks.
But, for unconventional Chinese designer and performance artist Wan Yunfeng, they are perfect.
From his small apartment in eastern Beijing, Wan makes fashion that only he wears.
Beijing-based artist Liu Yi is working on a series of black-and-white portraits he knows will never be shown in a Chinese gallery. His varied subjects — men and women, young and old, smiling and pensive — have one thing in common: They are Tibetans who have set themselves on fire to protest repressive Chinese rule.
Brother Gao are two China artists. Their works are aims at reflecting the reality of Chinese society in an artistic and critical view. In 2003, the brothers held an event to invite many strangers for a dinner.
"Stand Up, Sisters" tells the story of a rural girl who journeys to Beijing for a family visit, only to be deceived and forced into prostitution, suffering unthinkable hardships. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, these women are rehabilitated. The narrative reaches its peak with her and her younger sisters' victorious achievement of self-reliance.
“Rose Boy” (玫瑰少年) refers to Yeh Yung-chih, a 15-year-old junior high school student in Taiwan who died on April 20, 2000, after years of bullying due to his non-conforming gender expression. Though the official cause of death was ruled accidental—he allegedly slipped in a school bathroom—the circumstances surrounding his death, including prior complaints from his mother about repeated verbal and physical harassment, drew widespread public attention.
The world is shocked by China’s dog meat festival and by videos showing that animals are eaten alive in restaurants in Guangdong. But in that country of 1.3 billon people, a massive shift in ideology is happening. Our friends at PETA Asia are helping millions of people see that animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.