Chinese Artist Zhang Bingjian has embarked on an artistic project to promote transparency in China and Chinese government. His motivation? Discovering the extent of the corruption going on in his country. Zhang told the Toronto Star: “The chief prosecutor announced that 3,000 officials had been convicted for corruption in a single year. I remember being shocked, a little angry and then confused.”
Slippery When Wet proposes a wet ontology of Hong Kong—a city in ongoing transfiguration shifting into an uncanny vision of itself. Hong Kong secretes, leaving a trail of ink, tears, humidity, logistic flows, and leaks.
Chen Boer's first heroine film, which she co-wrote and directed, was "Daughter of China," about female soldiers in the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. They didn't have much filmed material at the time, but as a feminist, Chen Boer clearly wanted to record the sacrifices and contributions of Chinese women in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.
New Beijing, New Marriage is a documentary shot by Fan Popo, a Chinese gay rights activist in 2009. The film recorded that a gay couple and a lesbian couple, who were volunteers instead of real homosexual couples, were having their wedding photos taken at Qianmen Street on Valentine’s Day. Qianmen Street is a crowded and famous shopping street in Beijing.
They are disparaged as “free-willed” women, “stubborn,” “picky,” “incomplete.”
But a video by an East Asian beauty brand that went viral over the past week has upended the conversation on China’s sheng nu, which translates literally into “leftover women” — those who happen to be over 27 and unmarried.
“People think that in Chinese society an unmarried woman is incomplete. You feel like an outsider,” says one young woman.
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.
Earlier this year Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei recorded a gangnam style video, dancing handcuffed, sending a message to the Chinese authorities who responded by banning the video as soon as it came online. British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor
Women around the world fed up with long lines for the ladies’ restroom have a new folk hero: a Beijing college student leading her own version of an “occupy” movement in southern China.
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.
Fresh off the Boat examines the immigrant struggle told from the perspective of Eddie Huang, a modern day chef and video entrepreneur who has found a way to use food to explore culture, diaspora, and more through food, television, and the book that I am discussing now.
This book serves as an important storytelling experience of the immigrant and helps bridge the generational struggles often seen in these stories.
Students at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University are celebrating International Women’s Day with banners making light of a proposed constitutional amendment to scrap term limits for the country’s president.
One banner joked that a boyfriend’s term should also have no limits, while another said, "A country cannot exist without a constitution, as we cannot exist without you!”
HEFEI, China (AP) — Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people gathered Thursday near a state funeral home in Beijing as China’s former second-ranking leader, Li Keqiang, was put to rest, while a steady stream of mourners showed their respects at the ex-premier’s childhood home in central China.
Li, who was China’s top economic official for a decade, died last Friday of a heart attack at age 68.
Nanjing, a picturesque city lying by the Yangtze River, owes its fame to its favorable geographic position, galaxy of talents and profound historical background. Having served as the capital of ten dynasties in ancient China, its splendour has remained and even enlarged with an extended population up to 600,000 when the government of the Republic of China set up its capital there in 1927.
A group of South Korean activists is determined to send copies of The Interview across the North Korean border, despite threats from the state to respond with “cannons or missiles” if the plan succeeds.
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.
Just the other day, we were hearing about Samsung getting in legal trouble over patent violations with Apple. A federal court decision ruled that Samsung owes Apple more than $1 billion in restitution.
China's "Punchline Queen" Yang Li is no stranger to controversy.
The 29-year-old is now one of the country's most well-known comedians, having risen to fame in recent months on a Chinese television show called "Rock and Roast".
Every week, in front of a national audience of millions, she addresses controversial gender issues using a style unfamiliar to many Chinese viewers - stand-up comedy.
Imagine for a brief moment, that the world’s last five remaining communist countries decided to unite forces and hire the world’s top advertising agencies to re-brand and create a resurgence in the ideologies of Communism?
China's only seaside theater festival has been held in the resort town of Aranya in north China's Hebei Province. Artists from around the world traveled there to take deep dive into the world of dramatic performance. For theatergoers, there were interactive activities including cross-border installations such as seaside talks, environmental drama readings, screenings, theater houses, parades and bonfires by the sea.
"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.
From Public Delivery:
Kacey Wong has a knack for creating art that investigates the space between people and their surrounding environment. Paddling Home, which was performed on the Hong Kong Victoria Harbor, was a star feature in the Hong Kong contemporary art scene.
BEIJING – Before Yue Xin became a central figure in China’s burgeoning movement against sexual harassment, she recorded herself singing a revamped version of the 1960s pop classic “Que Sera Sera.”
“Will we be equal? Will we be free?” sang the Peking University senior in a voice clip posted online, putting her own spin on Doris Day’s “Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?”
Luke Ching Chin Wai is a conceptual artist and labour-artivist in Hong Kong. Since 2013, he has worked undercover in different low-paid jobs in the city, including as a security guard, supermarket cashier worker, and metro cleaner to learn about poor people's working conditions. He then uses these experiences to create art and push for improved labour rights.
Whose Utopia? is a color film which is 19 minutes 58 seconds long. It was originally commissioned by the Siemens Arts Program back in 2005. The projector-style video is based on the work and social lives of assembly line workers at OSRAM’s light bulb factory in the Pearl River Delta in China. This area has received huge numbers of immigrants from inland provinces seeking work and better lives in the wake of Beijing’s booming economy.
Buses serving several routes in central Seoul have acquired a new and highly controversial passenger: a barefoot “comfort woman”, wearing a traditional hanbok dress with her hands resting on her knees.