After more than two and a half years of discussion with Chinese artists, musicians, writers, bloggers, performers, filmmakers and arts professionals, about everything from yaogun to blogging to queer film, Artspace China is wrapping up the conversation here.

Thanks to all those who’ve been involved as readers, guest authors and interviewees. It’s been great talking to you!

The website will remain as is until the beginning of 2014, so all archives will be available until then. Artspace China’s Facebook page will keep chugging as well, keeping our presence online with regular posts of contemporary Chinese film, art, literature and music news.

Any further iterations of the Artspace China project (yes, there are possibilities) will be announced at the Facebook site as well, so keep your eyes peeled.

Until such time, happy travels, take care, and …

慢走!

In April 2011, I posted an interview with Josh Feola, co-founder of Beijing’s Pangbianr and central engine of Beijing’s DIY music community. Pangbianr, which translates loosely as ‘fringe’, was a wee one year old at the time, and was only beginning to feel its way, coalescing a sense of energy and self-sufficiency in the city’s underground music scene.

Almost two years later, Beijing DIY still feels like a nascent phenomenon, ever-morphing and ever on the brink of becoming (as any good DIY scene should). It’s more international than ever, hosting an increasing number of overseas acts, from punk to experimental to noise. At the same time, though, there are more mid to top-level labels in town, more of a push to ‘discover’ and promote Chinese rock – and an urge to become a ‘real’ band.

Contemporary China has a habit of building industries, or art complexes, for the sake of economy and reputation, overlooking the value in grassroots cultural communities. In this catch up interview, Josh gives an update on the scene, pointing to the value in the DIY ethos, and the dangers of commercialising too early.

I was late to learning about Gangnam Style. One night I was at a café and was socially garish enough to ask my companions what it was. ‘You don’t know about Gangnam style?,’ they gasped, half impressed, half horrified. ‘She doesn’t know about Gangnam style. Everybody knows about Gangnam style …’ I went home with the sticky sounding words in my head, trying to figure out how to pronounce them.

Of course, from that point on I started to see it everywhere. It kept popping up online, it was playing in the background in taxis. Even my four year old knew about it from kindergarten, and gave her own rendition of the South Korean rap with her own wonky dancing. I soon realised that more than the song itself, the point of the craze was its use for parody – originally of Seoul’s wannabe fashionistas, and later of all kinds of people and social phenomena. At this point, there are literally hundreds of adaptations of the dance uploaded to Youtube, each one a spin off from the original with its nonsensical horse-riding dance moves.

I suppose it’s because of the jig’s horsey characteristics that Ai Weiwei has now picked it up and turned it to his own light-hearted music video critique. Ai’s clip is a clear reference to the Grass Mud Horse – China’s own popular and virally transmitted parody – and so is also an oblique reference to China’s Internet censorship. (Grass Mud Horse sounds like F*** Your Mother, but is written differently, and now references a whole lexicon of other such homonyms that allow people to skirt censorship online).

I was I was recently asked to join Down: Indie Rock in the PRC director Andrew Field for a post-screening Q&A session at the North by Northeast (NXNE) Festival in Toronto. The film follows Field’s explorations through the music scene in 2007. The host of the afternoon, the festival’s film programmer, used the word “revelatory” on several occasions to describe the impact Field’s film had on him and could have on potential audiences. That’s definitely something I was ready for: The number one reaction I get when I tell people that I’ve written a book on Chinese rock music is confusion. That there might be such a thing is not something that crosses your average mind. And let me be clear: I’m not surprised that this is the case.

But every so often, I get thrown for a loop when I experience this disconnect.

Helen Feng, lead singer of Nova Heart, has been dubbed ‘China’s Blondie’, but the comparison doesn’t go quite far enough. Sexy, provocative and confident, she’s perhaps more of a femme Jim Morrison, constantly feeling out the boundaries of appropriateness in order to nudge them that bit further. A recent stage dive left her on crutches for months, and she’s just as bold offstage as on. Intelligent and articulate, Feng brims with opinions on American imperialism, Chinese politics, and the identity of the Beijing indie rock scene.

Born in Beijing, but raised in North America, Feng has been a major shaker in Beijing music circles since moving to China in 2002. In 2004 she started the punk band Ziyo [自游], in 2007 co-founded the electro group Pet Conspiracy, and in 2009 she and her partner, Philip Grefer, founded the Chinese music collective, FakeMusicMedia. Nova Heart is Feng’s long-planned solo project, and has the full force of her energy and professional experience.

Yan Jun is a creative polymorph. Search on his name on the Internet and you’ll come up with a list of roles – from experimental sound artist, to critic, to curator, to performance poet – and stories of his pioneering in China’s underground music scene from the late 1990s to early 2000s. In 1998 he began the independent label, Sub Jam, initially to publish zines and later for music CDs; and in 2004 he established Kwanyin records for the release of more experimental works. From June 2005 to December 2010, Yan and his Sub Jam community organised a series weekly of performances called Waterland Kwanyin at the Beijing Bar, 2Kolegas, serving up rock, experimental and electronic music to an ever-morphing crowd of listeners.

Both Sub Jam and Kwanyin continue, supported by a regularly updated blog (see here for Yan Jun’s own), as do gigs, and the general greasing of communal and creative activities for which Yan Jun has become widely known. Meanwhile Yan remains one of China’s most important experimental artists, pushing the limits of sound, language and music in his own performances and recordings. Translator, Maghiel van Crevel once said Yan Jun makes things happen, and there is no doubt that Yan has this generative role. Raised in Lanzhou, but based in Beijing since the late 1990s, Yan is something of a creative catalyst, preferring the early and ambiguous stages of invention and putting a high value on the amorphous in artistic communities.

Zhang Shouwang, frontman of Beijing rock group Carsick Cars and experimental band White, is possibly the most famous musician in Beijing’s indie music crowd, famed for his support of Sonic Youth and for being the man behind Beijing rock anthem Zhong Nanhai among other tunes.

Such is the openness of Beijing’s cultural scene that, only a week after I’d started asking around for his number, I was sitting on the grimy steps outside D-22, sharing a beer with the man himself and talking over the drones of a noise outfit playing inside.

Pangbianr 旁边儿 in Chinese means ‘next to’, or ‘to one’s side’, so it’s an appropriate name for a group based on the idea of community. Existing at the fringes of Beijing’s fringe culture, Pangbianr is a collective of Chinese and non-Chinese musicians, filmmakers, artists, distributors and general cultural enablers, working to create a DIY arts scene.

Pangbianr run events and a website – they also have an organic community farm beyond Beijing’s sixth ring road! But that’s another story, and you’ll have to check their website for that.

Below is my interview with Josh Feola, Pangbianr’s chief mover and shaker.

“The club space is long and narrow, with the bar on the right and the stage at the far end as you walk in. There is a balcony that runs from behind the stage right up to the front of the club. The walls of the club are painted a muddy red typical of old Beijing, and all along the balcony we have hung up the Matt Niederhauser posters of the best bands and musicians that have come out of the club.

On big nights when the club is full – it can take about 300-350 people – the bands are surrounded by the audience, above, below, in front and around one side. That generally gets them pretty juiced up. In the audience we typically get a lot of repeat customers – mainly lost wild kids, musicians, and people involved in the music scene. I suspect that they like to come often because we never charge them for admission or drinks and it’s the only time and place in which they are treated like stars. Maybe because of that repeat crowd we sometimes get accused of being cliquish, but I am not sure that there’s much we can do about that, and it’s easy to become part of the clique – just show up often and talk to the musicians. Everyone is pretty friendly.”

Michael Pettis is the guy behind D-22, and the record label, Maybe Mars, which runs as a side-project to the club. An ex-merchant banker, equities trader and professor of finance, he also has a love of music – specifically finding new bands and being at the generative core of new scenes. Pettis has played a huge role in the flourishing of Beijing indie rock, providing the venue, the label and a profile for the music overseas. He speaks passionately about the club, the personalities involved, and what might well be a history in the making. Read on …

At a small bar in Beijing, called D-22, sixty years of rock history are currently being mashed up in one thrillingly experimental moment. It’s almost like the entire canon of pop music has fallen out of the sky – punk, folk, reggae, rock, noise, rockabilly – and young Chinese musicians and their audiences are making of it what they will, taking a bit of Johnny Cash with a bit of Radiohead, Bjork and Joy Division and jamming it into something of their very own.

For the past four years, New York photographer, Matthew Niederhauser has been documenting this musical scene, posing his subjects against a red wall in the back room of the club or capturing them in action on stage. Joyside, P.K.14, AV Okubo, Carsick Cars, Hanggai and countless other Chinese bands have passed beneath his lens, mythologised by his consistent style and focus on D-22.

A selection of these photographs have recently been published in a book, Sound Kapital, which conveys the colour and dynamism of this scene. Click ‘Read More’ below to see some of these pictures, and to read Niederhauser describing what he calls the ‘creative orgy’ currently taking place in Beijing.