Director Vincent Ward on "Rain of the Children" and his Relationship with the Tuhoe People

    A young Puhi on her wedding day (Vincent Ward)

by Clare Pennington

Published: March 5, 2013

BEIJING — In 2007, 17 Tuhoe people originating from New Zealand’s remote Te Urewera territory were arrested and charged with terrorism. The following year the charges were dropped in exchange for lesser ones, but the event had already re-opened old wounds. The police had last carried out a full-scale raid in the land in 1916, killing two and arresting the tribe’s leader and his son. The second raid brought echoes of that first invasion which had never been forgotten.

Design, then, it might seem, that director Vincent Ward’s “Rain of the Children,” which is showing at this week’s New Zealand on Film festival in Beijing, was released the same year terrorism charges were dropped. The film is a docudrama that looks back at the life of the Tuhoe woman, Te Puhi Materoa Tatu, a survivor of the 1916 persecution.

In fact there was no connection intended by the film’s director, Vincent Ward, but the release of his film and the backlash from the 2007 raids coinciding is a reminder of how old colonial tensions continue to play out in modern New Zealand.

Pregnant with her first child, Puhi’s brother-in-law was shot dead, her husband and father-in-law, the prophet and Tuhoe leader Rua Kenana, arrested. Often referred to simply as “Puhi,” she was to have fourteen children by three men over the coming years, and suffer the loss of all but one, her last son, Niki.

Ward’s interaction with the Tuhoe tribe began with filming an octogenarian Puhi and her son Niki for his first feature, the documentary “In Spring One Plants Alone” (1981) in the late ‘70s. “For [“In Spring One Plants Alone”] I was more like a fly on the wall,” Ward told ARTINFO.

But Ward was not a passive observer — he lived on and off with Puhi over two years beginning at the formative age of 21. “There had been other documentaries made about Maori peoples, but they tended to be observational, anthropological studies. They were very detached ...and they lacked veracity.”

His relationship to his subject was at once societal and deeply personal, and it is outtakes and other footage from this first feature that make up a large part of “Rain of the Children.”

Ward achieved this intimate footage by spending most of his time with her helping her do chores, or driving her where she needed to go. Every few weeks, the film crew visited for a couple of days, after which she would promptly kick them out. “She had a temper. Once when I was filming and not helping her, she knocked the camera right out of my hands,” he remembers.

Archival images, reconstructions and interviews with Puhi’s descendants, as well as Ward’s own personal voice over, combine to make up the rest of the film. By his, but foremost the Puhi’s descendants’ choice, it is her own relatives that act out the reconstructions of her life.

And these reconstructions, often in black and white or desaturated color film, are essential to gradually presenting the beliefs held by Puhi and her community. For a while, we not only observe but are also drawn in to understand how the Tuhoe believe in a world that oscillates between the dead and the living, and how Puhi came to see herself as cursed. And finally our eyes and hearts are opened to her search to communicate with her lost children, by drawing herself closer to the world of the dead.

And in a way, she, like the colonial wounds inflicted on her community, has herself lived on beyond her own death. “In a reassuring way the old lady haunted me,” said Ward. “I kept interpreting her life.”

“I wanted to look at her in terms of her people, not my people,” he explained. Hence the lack of judgement on the community that at times took her children, or worked her to the bone. “Taking feminism as a perspective is a high moral, caucasian judgement,” he said as one example.

It was taking on new perspectives that Ward learned from living with Puhi. Puhi, Ward said, brought him a whole new extended family. But she also did more than that to change him.

“She stripped away the boundaries of my understanding of what life could be and is. It’s like you open a door and walk into another world and suddenly you have a range of experiences open to you, and I had someone there who was a friend and a guardian. Who helped me survive it somehow.”

And now, says Ward, he hopes he can bring this message to audiences around the world, especially, he says in China, where tumultuous, fast-paced change has rocked communities that might understand where his take on a Maori peoples’ history is coming from.

"Rain of the Children" is screening at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art on March 10, 2pm

Originally posted in Artinfo China. 

Interview: Zhang Shouwang on Carsick Cars, the UCCA Electric Music Concert, and His Generation

    Split musical personalities: Zhang Shouwang in Beijing (Photo courtesy Renhang)

by Clare Pennington

Published: March 2, 2013

 

BEIJING — Zhang Shouwang, founder of what is perhaps China’s most popular indie band, Carsick Cars, was writing and performing music for his other band, White, before Carsick Cars ever played to a livehouse.

“For White I was writing music for massed guitars with six or seven different guitarists,” Zhang told ARTINFO. “One of the cool things always about the music scene in Beijing is that many of us are able to work on different kinds of music [at the same time] and there is no pressure to make only one kind of music.”

With this in mind, Zhang will be performing at the second Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) “ON | OFF” concert on Monday, focusing on experimental electric music, along with Eli Marshall and Chui Wan frontman Yan Yulong, “who is one of my favorite of the younger musicians in Beijing,” said Zhang.

But at the same time Zhang is also planning to tour in China and abroad with both of his bands this year, and is working on a new Carsick Cars album (“We will work with a producer from one of my favorite bands in the world but Maybe Mars has asked us not to say his name yet because we are still organizing it,” said Zhang).

Apart from the UCCA show, Zhang also has plenty of other personal projects on the side. “I still do many shows with Carsick Cars and White, but also I do many experimental solo and collaboration shows at places like XP,” he said.

Until he was 17, when he heard a Velvet Underground album for the first time, Zhang didn’t think much about music. “Photography was more interesting for me,” he said. At univeristy, he studied what he refers to as “some kind of technology” for two years before dropping out to concentrate on his music.

“Most of what I heard was either music from TV or pop music, and some of it I really liked, like Michael Jackson, but it was not really something I thought belonged to me. It was for old people, or for people who lived abroad.”

Velvet Underground was not only beautiful in Zhang’s opinion, but it “also sounded like music that young people in Beijing could make. So that was when I thought that I can make music too that isn't a patriotic song or a love song or something like that.”

Without having had formal training (the musician has done a lot of self-teaching and reading over the years), Zhang sometimes composes for classical music ensembles. He shrugs this off, though, when asked about how he got into this and what he thinks of classical music. “I don't really think that music has different kinds. If you like to make music you try to make music that seems exciting to you and you use different ways to make it. A chamber ensemble is different from a rock band and so it is like making a sound with a different instrument.” The idea of thinking in terms of strict differentiations between genres  just “isn’t interesting.”

Zhang admires and has played with the American composer Glenn Branca, and considering his experimentation with drone guitar and harmonic series this doesn’t come as a surprise. “I even played with him for his 10th Symphony in New York and met some of his friends, who showed me more music,” said Zhang.

The upcoming UCCA concert will also seek to experiment with harmonics through the electric guitar, Eli Marshall told ARTINFO in another interview. Working with various artists in a plethora of styles, there is a sense of constant learning that eminates from the now-established musician.

This concert series runs in parallel to the “ON | OFF” art exhibition, and focuses on the post-Mao generation of artists. Zhang said of this focus that his parents’ and grandparents’ generation could not pass down the values they held close to his own contemporaries because their own experience was and is so different. “So we didn't know what to do. We didn't have anything that we liked that we could work with. That made us try to make something for ourselves, I think,” said Zhang.

“If you hear our music you don't say that it is normal Chinese music or normal foreign music,” Zhang opined.  It is “Beijing music of our generation.”

The “ON | OFF: SWITCH”  electronic music concert is on at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art  at 6pm on March 3.

Originally posted in Artinfo China. 

Q&A: Brandnü Founder, Nathan Zhang, on his Upcycling Fashion Boutique

    Nathan Zhang in front of Brandnü in Wudaoying Hutong

 

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 27, 2013

 

BEIJING — Nathan Zhang is wearing a new hat made from second-hand sweaters and unused, discarded fabrics — it's a patchwork of subtly-interwoven colored diamonds in some blocks and striking blue-and-white stripes in others. The soft, palanquinesque winter item is from his shop and fashion label, Brandnü, conceived of in 2009 as a charitable enterprise.

Zhang works with migrant women to create the patchworks used in the clothes he sells, all in the name of a socially and ecologically responsible fashion enterprise. And with the new fashion lines his designers use the materials to make, Brandnü straddles the line between new fashion and vintage. “All I wear is garbage,” he joked to ARTINFO when we asked what clothes he was sporting — every one was made from upcycled materials or was second-hand.

But that doesn’t mean Brandnü, which also gets donations of discarded fabric from factories surrounding Beijing like Yida, isn’t the real thing. The shop's roster of designers includes some of China’s best up and coming names. Between them, he points out, they’ve designed for Hermes and even Björk.

ARTINFO finds out more about the man and the story behind his tiny fashion space in one of Beijing’s trendiest hutongs:

How did you get into fashion?

I have always liked fashionable clothes — even when I was young in the ‘70s and lived in a small city in Liaoning where you couldn’t buy anything. I was always able to find a way to make things looks unique. I guess I was just born with a good sense of color and style.

What brought you to the idea of opening Brandnü?

I always liked the charity shop model in Canada, where I lived for 10 years. When I came back to Beijing from Toronto, there was nothing like that here, so I decided I would open my own charity shop. My friend was by coincidence renting a space in Wudaoying, but he never used it, so after he heard my idea he told me to use it for free for a year. That’s how I came to Wudaoying Hutong.

Before that I was chief director for a local TV station [in Xinjiang]. I thought it would be more creative, but it turned out to be exhausting work, so after almost a year I quit to find something more interesting. I decided to start my own project, which became Brandnü.

Who were the first designers you worked with? 

The first designers I ever worked with were Zhang Na, who has her own brand called Na Too, and Sara Yun who also has her own [eponymous] label. Sara is a good friend of mine and we first met in my shop — she was very inspired by my project so she asked a lot of questions. She had the talent and I had the resources, so when one day I decided to do “second-hand fashion,” Sara designed the first few fashion lines, which I still use to today.

I also met Zhang Na at my shop, and she was the first designer to use my patched fabric. These have become really popular items.

Who are you working with the most on a regular basis?

Zhang Na is the designer I work the most with. She has been using my patched fabric to make collections which are the same as her regular ones. Her designs are very detailed, and have lots of childlike fun. Her [upcoming] Spring and Summer collection this year is inspired by [the story of] “Peter and the Wolf”.

What about your most recent collections? And how involved are you with these?

I have never designed a collection to be honest. I am more of a project coordinator, working with migrant women and fashion designers. For Brandnü, our newest collection is going to be something more mainstream and for easy wear.

Most of the clothes I like or design myself are inspired by the things my kids play with or like. For example, I designed a cape with spikes on the back inspired by my kids’ dinosaur toy. (Zhang is also wearing a lime-green, felt, fish-shaped pouch round his neck that one suspects came from a similar flash of creativity.)

How is Brandnü financed? What is its set-up and place in the market?

I borrowed money from my family to start Brandnü. It is a social enterprise. I wanted to provide job opportunities to migrant and rural women whilst producing the most fashionable upcycle items on the market. I want Brandnü to be recognized for being a creative, well-intended, and environmentally-friendly brand.

How did this come about with the migrant workers and can you tell us a bit more about what do they do?

At first when I opened my shop I took clothing donations, which I then gave to the migrant worker community. There are five second-hand clothes shops in the area and they sell these donated clothes to the migrant workers who can’t afford brand new ones.

Within that community, there were quite a few women who couldn’t work because they had to take care of their kids, so the migrant worker organization set up a migrant women’s sewing cooperative. I saw they had no idea what they wanted to do and neither did they have the ability to make things in a way that added value to them.

When I then discovered that there were so many second-hand clothes that they could not be sold individually and were having to be sold by weight, I came up with the idea to cut them into patterns and make them to patched fabric, which could be used in different ways to turn these old clothes into fashionable products.

I pay the workers according to how much patched fabric they have made. It is important to work with them because they lack opportunity. Since I am good at building bridges between different groups, I have kept working with them and am still trying to keep improving their living conditions. Right now I am working on an International Women’s Day event and trying to raise money to improve the migrant women sewing cooperative’s working conditions.

What is the difference between clothes and fashion?

Clothes are there to keep you warm, while fashion is there to show your attitude. Fashion means free, unique and young.

Originally posted in Artinfo China. 

Interview: Li Gang on Seeing the World With a Different Slant

    Li Gang's "Beads" installed at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 21, 2013

BEIJING — Discussing his piece “Beads” (2012), one of several works that will be on view at the exhibition “Lateral Edge” at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing (March 2 through April 29), artist Li Gang says: “It’s about the paths and points of change in our lives that determine where we go and what we become.”

Which is something that the 26-year-old painter/photographer/sculptor knows well about. In 2008, Li arrived in Beijing with just 6,000RMB ($960) in his pocket; by the end of the week, he was living in a dingy underground room with just 40RMB ($6.50) to spare. Just in time, he met noted Chinese performance artist He Yunchang (also known as A Chang). “He told me I needed a job, and asked me to work in his studio,” Li explains. Working for the photographer in Caochangdi, Li rented a closet-sized space round the corner in which to create his own work. But, “nobody wanted to show my art,” Li says. “Even the galleries with bad shows in 798 [Beijing art district], they didn’t want me.” After having saved enough money, he left the job to study at theCentral Academy of Fine Art.

But then, a year later, gallery owner Urs Meilepaid a visit to He Yunchang and spotted one of Li’s works hanging in the photographer’s personal collection. He asked to meet with the artist; and just a few days later, Li was preparing for his first-ever solo exhibition at Meile’s Lucerne branch.

Preparing now for his second solo exhibition, the floor inside the Caochangdi exhibition space is scattered with cork-colored wooden spheres, some as small as a string of pearls amongst a few larger, beach-ball sized globes. “Beads” took just under a year to complete, and began with the artist’s return to his hometown of Dali in Yunnan Province.
After searching for a specimen of tree that had died naturally, Li ran across a Tiangtang Shu (“Tree of Paradise”) and took it apart, carefully carving the nodes where each branch connected into spheres.

There is something elemental about the wooden spheres, which were left untreated for their natural tactility and lightness, and are cracked and pierced with natural holes. The tiny pinpoints represent moments of transformation, bursts of energy and change that occurred at certain points in time. 

Many of the other pieces on display also make use of links and associations. Li’s own favorite piece in the exhibition, “Ridge” (2012), is an installation made of two stones connected by epoxy, painted using creams and grays. While the initial effect of the piece is something akin to an open circle of bones hung on the wall, Li’s own intention, he says, “was more about the process of connecting two things.”

The artist adds, “Originally I was also thinking of doing it with apples, or with fake human skulls. When I’d made one, and a friend commented it looked like a bone, so I asked ten more people to come over and have a look, and they all agreed. But it wasn’t part of my intention.” The rough edges of the stones and subtly contrasting mottled grays, browns, creams, and soft reds, relate to Li’s ongoing fascination with textural detail. “Using something similar to a black and white palette is about exploring the subtle relationship between colors and shades — it’s not about only the colors in themselves,” he explains.

Other paintings meant to call attention to texture and perception include blown-up sections of works by other artists, what Li terms a “new slant”: “Big Moustache” (2012) is a close-up on a section of a mustache from a Rembrandt painting. “Green Vase” enlarges a section of the handle in a smaller painting of a jug to encompass an entire 71-by-63 inch canvas. On both, oil paint is applied directly to canvases weaved from thick rope, rather than cotton or linen. In contrast to his installation work, however, these fall a bit flat; once you’ve figured out the trick and can envision the wider picture, they seem less mature.

In fact, though Li originally trained as a painter, he believes that breaking free of working purely on canvas is what led him to begin creating more sophisticated work. “The most important thing,” Li says, “is the chain of thoughts your work can instill in others.” By making his own creative connections explicit to others in his work, he hopes that he’ll be continually pushed to create innovative, thoughtful art.

“I don’t want what I tackle to become narrower as I develop as an artist,” he says. “Each time I make a work of art, I want something that can make people look at their relationship with the world around them in a fresh, new way.”

“Lateral Edge” runs from March 2 through April 29 at Galerie Urs Meile

Originally posted in Artinfo.

Q&A: Composer Liang Lei on Beijinghua, Peking Opera, and Missing Home

    Composer Liang Lei (Photo by Ron Jones)

 

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 17, 2013

BEIJING — Liang Lei, the Chinese-born composer known for his visionary and explorative compositions, had one of his earliest pieces played in China for the first time this year. “Dialectal Percussions,” which takes its inspiration from the local Beijing dialect (also known as Beijinghua), was composed in 1994, but was heard by a Beijing audience for the first time this January at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

The Rome Prize and Aaron Copland Award-winner, who now lives permanently in America, spoke to ARTINFO about operating in a globalized music scene, his cultural heritage and what it was like growing up amongst his generation of composers.

You wrote this piece when you were 22. What about “Dialectal Percussions” marks it as emerging from this point in your life and career? 

My sense of home-seeking was becoming more and more acute. I left Beijing when I was 17. Around the time I composed this piece, I was listening to a lot of cassette tapes of Peking Opera and Xiangsheng (a kind of Chinese stand-up comedy that makes use of puns and allusions, also known as Cross-talk).

Perhaps that was a way for me to relive my memories of Beijing. Only after I left China, did I start to miss Beijing so much. Growing up there, I used to dislike the Beijing dialect, thinking it too unfriendly to outsiders.

But when I discovered some old recordings of Hou Baolin's Xiangsheng (Hou Baolin, who died in 1993, was one of China’s most illustrious Xiangsheng performers), I started to feel the warmth of the dialect radiating through time. I fell in love with these sounds again and started appreciating their dramatic delivery and musicality. Along with Peking Opera [performances] by Mei Lanfang, this was a way of home-seeking. 

What was it about the dialect that attracted you? 

I was mesmerized by its dramatic effects in intonation, rhythmic articulation, and musical expressivity. Some of the materials are from Beijinghua, some from Peking Opera. I extracted those moments that were particularly attractive, and isolated them in my composition. Using music, I framed these moments with silences, as if I was using a magnifying glass to look at the details of this language in slow motion.

You have been commended for being truly cross-cultural in your compositions. Is this aspect of your music important to you?

What is important for me is to avoid using Chinese references as labels or national flags in the music. Whether it is Chinese, American or European doesn't matter at all, provided it is interesting.

The reason is that I think it is easier to provoke reactions by using cultural labels — but these labels are, more often than not, crude generalizations and misleading simplifications. It is more challenging and rewarding artistically to penetrate those juxtapositions, and to create works that are real hybrids both musically and aesthetically.

What marks out your generation of musicians from your forefathers? 

It is hard to speak for my generation, so I can only try to speak for myself. My predecessors have an enormous influence on me. But our age, and the intellectual, technological, and cultural resources are vastly different from what they were 20 years ago.

When I left China 23 years ago, the country had just started on its path to today's prosperity. Until then, I had never visited an open-shelf library in China. When I was in college in the US, the best way for me to study the Buddhist scriptures or Chinese literary treatises was by borrowing books from the Yenching Library at Harvard and hand-copying them.

Today, I still think that is the best way to learn, but at the same time, all of these resources are easily available on the internet. We live in a global age with almost immediate access to unlimited resources. This only makes me realize that I cannot satisfy myself by using cultural labels to communicate with my audience — they deserve better. 

They have seen much more of the world than they would have done 20 years ago, so these labels are hardly exotic anymore. Today's audience is more sophisticated and deserves musical dialogues that are more in depth and meaningful, which generate truly new and innovative experiences. 

“Dialectal Percussions” is for the following percussion instruments: the temple bell, 5tempbl, tam-t, tom-t, bng, b.d, xiao luo or small gongs, da luo or big gongs, two xiao bo or small cymbals, and peng zhong or Buddhist chanting bells (a pair). 

Originally posted in Artinfo China

Peng Tao Picks The Top Five Chinese Documentaries

Chinese director Peng Tao

by Clare Pennington
Published: January 29, 2013

BEIJING ― Chinese documentary cinema is gradually gaining international recognition, with films like  “Up the Yangtze” and “Last Train Home” winning awards overseas and thereby reaching a wide international audience.

But these films spring from a 20 year legacy of documentary making in China that remains largely undiscovered, in large part because the films were never cleared by the Chinese film bureau, and thus couldn’t be shown in cinemas in the country where they were made. ARTINFO asked director Peng Tao to give us an education in the best of early Chinese documentaries.

Peng is described as one of China’s New Urban Generation, mostly documentary film makers working at the close of the 20th century. Like many of his contemporaries, Peng began by crafting documentary films for the state owned China Central Television (CCTV) before later turning to a career in independent film making.

“Chinese documentary cinema was completely revolutionized in the late ’90s and 2000s in China. Suddenly everyone could own a camera because of digital technology. So we are also known as the D Generation,” says Peng. “We could afford to go and make something that was for ourselves.

1. “The Other Bank”, 1994, directed by Jiang Yue

Filmed in 1993, “The Other Bank” follows a group of young actors who studied drama at the Beijing Film Academy.  Some of them stay on to perform the play “The Other Bank” written by Gao Xingjian (later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature).

But Jiang doesn’t leave his subjects in the elation of their avant-garde theater debut. The film goes on to examine both the art of acting, and the challenges of breaking from the working class into the intellectual class of artists, which also promises financial gains. We see each penniless young actor fail, as they eventually return to work in factories or farms when their next performance prospect falls through.

What Peng says: “This is an independently produced documentary that tells the story of a group of kids from outside Beijing who failed to get into university but are trying to achieve their dream of stardom. I saw this film nearly 20 years ago, and I found very moving. It made an impression on me that remains with me to this day.”

2. “Dream walking”, 2005, directed by Huang Wenhai

This black and white documentary, a sequel to the director’s earlier film “Floating Dust”, seeks to show what it means to survive in China as an artist.

“Dream Walking” features four artists who move from Beijing to Henan province for the summer. Three visual artists and a poet are shown working on their own projects and discussing their understanding of the meaning of art in their society. The film is a record of the chaos and tumult in contemporary China as seen by artists. 

What Peng says: “Here a group of idealistic artists find clarity in art, as they explore their reality and their convictions. This film really made me look at myself and the way in which artists survive in China. Artists here are jsut a bunch of poor wretches.”

3. “For every minute that I live, I’ll enjoy the 60 seconds,” 2006, by Zhang Zhanqing 

Da Gang has just come into his forties. He’s divorced, has lost his job and his mother suffers from mental illness. A story both distressing and yet imbued with a deep sense of hope, we see Da Gang living on the edge as he tries to scrape a living in the morning and spends the rest of the day at underground clubs and drinking. 

The title for the film is the maxim by which he lives, as he seeks to forget the pains of his divorce and his financial failure.

What Peng says: “The protagonist takes a naïve, trusting and very basic approach to life, blocking out the past, and basically indulging himself where he can. In a way, this film made me feel happy. It shows a victim of circumstances doing what he can to stay hopeful.”

4. “Crime and Punishment”, 2007, directed by Zhao Liang

Set in a police station in Northeast China, Zhao managed to get the footage for this film by telling the police he was doing research for a fictional screenplay. A study of power, “Crime and Punishment,” shows the police interrogating petty criminals, going about their daily routines and in some scenes beating up the people they have arrested.

What Peng says: “This film takes place in a police station in Northern China, one that is just like any other, in any corner of the country.

“You see how they work on a daily basis for the government to control people, to maintain social stability and you get a a sense of their own idea of what their responsibilities are. This is a really excellent film, and I think its director, Zhao Liang, is probably the best in China after Wang Bing, famous for his film “The Ditch” about Chinese labor camps.”

5. “Dr Ma’s Country Clinic,” 2007, Directed by Cong Feng

Filmed in a small rural town in China’s Western province of Gansu, “Dr Ma’s Country Clinic” is the story of Doctor Ma Bingcheng and his patients. The film offers slice-like insights into the patients’ lives and their contemporary rural society, as they queue and gossip about the best and worst of their experiences with each other.

What Peng says: “A warm and heartfelt documentary of the people and landscapes of China’s rural West, this film has a powerful visual impact. Cong Feng is a good friend, and in this film I could really see the enthusiasm he has for his art.”

Originally posted in Artinfo China.

Beijing's Top Five Music Venues

Experimental performance at XP (Courtesy Deng Chenglong)

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 8, 2013

 

BEIJING — The capital has more music venues than ever before. ARTINFO takes you through five of the best. 

Yugong Yishan 

A favorite venue for local and international acts, Yugong Yishan has a capacity of several hundred and attracts up to 6,000 people a month. But its present manifestation is a far cry from the live house’s roots. The name refers to a Chinese legend about a foolish old man who wanted to move the mountain in front of his house. Despite being called a hopeless idiot, the mountain was eventually transferred — by his descendants, a few generations later.

“The first place we opened was in 2003 — it was a cafe up by Qinghua University,” says founder and owner Lü Zhiqiang, who himself played in a heavy metal band back in the ’80s and ’90s.  Then in 2004 the cramped music cafe became a bar with a stage and a pool table in the now-trendy area near the Worker’s Stadium, but this was eventually torn down when the area was developed for the 2008 Olympics. 

With a growing music scene, the time was ripe to move to a larger and more dedicated music venue, which Lü hoped would be a place to bring a greater variety of local and international acts to the stage.

“Between 1995 and 1999 I lived in Berlin, and seeing music and bands I had never come across before made me want to bring that stuff here,” Lü told ARTINFO.  

About half of Yugong Yishan’s acts now come from abroad, with last year’s highlights including the provocative Peaches, metal heads Apocalyptica and Japanese breakbeat duo Hifana. 

XP 

XP is located in Beijing’s trendy Di’anmen area and dedicates itself for the most part to experimental music and collaborative performances. But its story really starts with the legendary D-22, once the pioneer and champion of Beijing’s music scene and, like XP, founded by economist and music aficionado Michael Pettis. 

“[In 2005] there were a lot of bars around with just a stage, but there was no real venue for music,” says Nevin Domer, D-22’s booking manager from 2006, and also COO at Pettis’ record label Maybe Mars. Maybe Mars has its offices in XP’s upstairs. 

“D-22 became a space where musicians would be able to jam until 5am after a show. You’d have punk musicians turn up on a jazz night just to drink beer because it was a place for people who cared about music,” he says. 

“[In] those days I felt something was growing at D-22, and being there week in, week out, really exaggerated the feeling. Perhaps unnaturally so,” says Josh Feola who used to work as well as drum there with psychedelic band Chui Wan. 

A few years later the bands D-22 was supporting — paying them to play less, so that the value of their gigs would go up and they would have time to work on their music — went from playing to crowds of 40 to a few hundred, and the intimate venue’s raison d’être seemed to be sliding. The community was and continues to be “fragmenting in different ways,” says Feola. 

“[In 2012] the reasons that Michael [Pettis] started D-22 were not as important anymore. The musicians from the underground had gained acceptance,” says Domer. Larger venues like Yugong Yishan, Tango and Mao had emerged since and were more suitable. 

When problems with the landlord meant moving, “we decided we wanted to do something important for what the scene is now,” he says. “We looked back at sections in the scene that needed support and decided on these young experimental musicians.” 

D-22 had hosted a weekly experimental music night called “Zoomin’ Night,” from which XP could grow. 

“We are ok with having rock bands though,” says Domer. “We also want the venue to be as fluid as possible, not for it to be this rigid live venue.” They are planning to have more “curated nights,” where musicians who wouldn’t usually collaborate get together and jam. 

“P.K. 14 frontman Yang Haisong, for example, will soon start inviting young musicians from around China and bring them to Beijing, often for the first time,” says Domer. XP are also hoping to record some of these live sessions and release them on CDR.

“Our idea is to experiment with the idea of the live experience, too. We are pretty loose with the term experimental.” 

Old What Bar

  

Old What is a funky dive bar with old Monkey King murals and a small capacity of a couple of dozen people. It also was and still remains a long-time favorite in the music scene. 

Having been around since the 90s, “it’s a tie to a completely different stage in the city’s musical development,” says Feola. “It’s the physical space where many bands who've gone on to great success and are associated with more famous venues or record labels got their actual start.”

It isn’t all about nostalgia, though. Mainly, it’s punk and raggae nights now, but from time to time bands like Carsick Cars and Hedgehog, who can play to 800-strong crowds, do a secret show at Old What with a tiny crowd. “So you never know what to expect,” says Domer.

2Kolegas

East of Liangmaqiao, 2Kolegas is further from the city center than most music joints, and as a result can be nearly empty in winter months. But the seven-year-old venue comes into its own in the heat of summer.

“They have the best sound of any venue in the city and a really nice yard that can accommodate many more people in a more comfortable environment than any other venue in Beijing,” says Feola. It’s garden space, set next to a grassy drive in cinema, is perfect day and night for outdoor gigs and parties. 

Founded in May 2005 by Liu Miao and Gao Feng, the shack-like structure and its green patch have played host to local and international rock bands over the years, as well as punk, reggae and other genres. 

Zajia Lab

“Zajia is more experimental with a capital E,” says Domer about this small and beautiful hutong experimental arts space. 

Apart from its red brick, wood beams and lofts, Zajia is known for bringing artists practicing in any medium into the musical mix. They've previously hosted acts like FM3 of Buddha Machine fame among other less well known experimentalists. 

“The old Daoist temple architecture suits the [experimental music and film] events very well,” says Feola, who rates Zajia among his favorite music venues.

But you better get there quick. The area around Gulou, or the Drum Tower, is slated for a revamping project that may well see many of these stunning buildings destroyed and rebuilt along more commercial lines later this year. 

Originally posted in Artinfo China.

Concerts at the UCCA Showcase Young Chinese Composers

 

Chen Bingye performs a piece at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art at the first in a series featuring young composers (Photo courtesy UCCA).

 

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 4, 2013

 

BEIJING — In January, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) began a series of concerts in association with “ON | OFF”, an exhibition of 50 works that has filled the cavernous arts center. The next two concerts will take place in the coming two months.

Born in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the musicians involved in this concert series grew up in a new era of consumerism, wider access to information and a more international art scene. 

Eli Marshall, the American composer curating the concert series, told ARTINFO, “I am programming all three of these concerts away from traditional chamber music and toward more integrated forms which are sometimes seen as more fringe: percussion, electronic-acoustic, and traditional Chinese instruments.”

The first installment, “Sound | Space Percussion Dramas by the 70|80 Generation of Composers” which took place in January for a crowd of about 200, focused on percussion. It brought together works some of China’s rising composers, as well as one of the country’s most acclaimed, 2011 Rome Prize-winner Liang Lei who now lives in the US.

Marshall explained that he wanted to show that “composers can do much, even without definite-pitched instruments.” Percussion plays an important role in Chinese drama, narrative storytelling and Chinese opera. Here, the compositions were in varied ways inspired by this dramatic inheritance. 

Liang’s contribution, “Dialectal Percussions,” which the composer wrote nearly ten years ago, was performed to a background of shadow projections that moved along the tall factory walls. Based on the sounds of the loal Beijing dialect and the expressive narratives traditionally performed in the city, dramatic lighting is obligatory here, as is a theatrical delivery from the percussionist. The poised musician’s movements slowed and started in ways that sometimes brought dancing to mind. 

Another highlight of the show was Chen Bingye’s “Improvisation,” played for the first time time here in Beijing. A young professor at the Central Conservatory in China and ten years Lei’s junior, Chen played her own composition on a single bass drum for nearly ten minutes. She manipulated nearly every section of the drum to evoke a wide variety of sounds, mostly using brushes.  

The next concert in the series, though, will leave percussion to concentrate on experimental electronic music. Video works and recorded pieces will be presented together, in a show that will feature "noise" figures like Yan Yulong of Chui Wan and Zhang Shouwang of Carsick Cars. 

The final concert, Marshall tells us, “will consist of a large ensemble of traditional instruments performing newly-commissioned works by a wide range of composers of this generation.” If there is enough funding, they even plan to release an album with this last concert. 

  

See VIDEO of UCCA's Philip Tinari introducing "ON/OFF" to ARTINFO.

Originally posted in Artinfo China.

Frontwoman Ben Ben on her Band, Skip Skip Ben Ben and Their New Album

 

Ben Ben, the woman at the head of shoegazers Skip Skip Ben Ben (Photo courtesy Lu Ran)

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 4, 2013

 

BEIJING — Shoegazers Skip Skip Ben Ben released their second album “Sacrifice Mountain Hills” here last month. 

Ben Ben, as the band’s Taiwan-born frontwoman Lin Yile is known to friends and fans, started the band just over two years ago. They have already produced two albums, and soon after having finished the latest installment, Ben Ben is once again working on new material.

The singer-guitarist spent her childhood with a mother who taught the piano and a father who sang gospel. “I grew up listening to music from church because of my parents’ Christianity, but we also listened to a lot of old jazz, like Miles Davis, Chet Baker and Bill Evans,” she told ARTINFO. At high school, she came across Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth. 

By the age of twelve Ben Ben, who feels comfortable playing on a range of instruments, was composing tunes on the keyboard. When, after working with a few bands in Taiwan, she jumped ship to China, she started out playing the drums for the band in which her boyfriend was a member, the popular Carsick Cars. 

“It was too time-intensive,” she says. The outspoken musician soon left to devote herself to her own project, and Skip Skip Ben Ben was born. 

For their name, she preceded her own nickname (pronounced Ban Ban in Chinese) with the title of a favorite song from the musically diverse Japanese punk rockers Judy and Mary. “It sounded more fun,” she explains. 

“Sacrifice Mountain Hills,” consists of nine songs that bring together influences like Brit Pop and Sonic Youth-style alternative rock, with Ben Ben’s own sweet clean voice wavering in and out of the sometimes soothing, sometimes wistful instrumentals. “We all like different kinds of music, but that works well for us together as a band,” says Ben Ben. 

Just as their influences and sound are hard to define, the band’s music is often described as ‘shoegaze’ ― an appropriately nebulous term.

When it comes to her contribution, she says, “I don’t really understand my music in terms of a definition, it’s more about where it comes from, emotionally.  Making music is a form of emotional catharsis,” she says.  

Many of the songs have a certain direct simplicity about them, despite their gently and subtly intertwining layers. Songs are written on the spot, and lyrics are general enough to be universal or even abstract. Often, they appear as if they are only echoing in the distance of the dazed, droning guitar textures.  

Her own band is often associated with the peers she most admires in China — many of them are in fact signed on to the same Beijing-based label, Maybe Mars. “When I feel unhappy, I like listening to creative bands ― to peers whose music I find a connection with, like Chui Wan, Hedgehog, Dice and Snapline,” Ben Ben says. 

None of these are Taiwanese bands, and while Ben Ben feels “the music scene in Taiwan is like Japan in that it is quite independent,” she also accuses it of being a too commercial. “Mainland China on the other hand offers great conditions for a more mature and developed rock scene.” 

The only regret? “There is too much competition between musicians in Beijing,” says the eclectic musician, who is planning once again to play as a guest for some bands on her visit to Taiwan this month. After that, Skip Skip Ben Ben will be back here in March for a China-wide tour when you can catch them promoting their new album. 

Originally posted in Artinfo China.

Independent Director Peng Tao on His Latest Film “The Cremator”

     Old Cao lies down with his prospective spirit bride in "The Cremator".
 

by Clare Pennington

Published: January 24, 2013

 

BEIJING — It is generally considered indecorous to let your phone ring during a wedding or a funeral. Imagine then, a priest dressed from head to toe in a traditional, tasseled red costume, singing prayers in a nearly lost language, suddenly stopping to take a call. Even more bewildering, the ceremony is both a wedding and a funeral.

That is what happens in an early scene of “The Cremator”, independent director Peng Tao’s latest film. Shown for the first time in China at a small Beijing film salon last week, “The Cremator” explores a modern consumer society and rural poverty in China through the practice of ‘spirit weddings’, (or minghun in Chinese). These posthumous pairings see two bodies buried in the same grave so that they can spend their afterlives together.

Set in China’s Shaanxi province, where the pull of this tradition remains strong, the film tells the story of Old Cao, a middle-aged man who works cremating bodies in the province’s capital, Xi’an. On the side, he is involved in the sordid trade of unclaimed female corpses. Brought to the crematorium when no identity is found, he helps to sell them as ‘spirit brides’ to people whose sons or brothers died bachelors.

“There are a lot of young miners in Shaanxi province, so a lot of people there die young,” the 38 year old director told ARTINFO. “Their lives are far from perfect, but they still hold on to the hope that the afterlife will be. That’s why it happens. There was even a murder case reported once, the motive being that a family wanted to find their deceased son a bride.”

Betraying the director’s background as a documentary maker, the film has a cast of unprofessional actors and no musical score. “In a way this is real life, so I wanted to give the film a sense of being real,” explains Peng.

The plot leaps forward when Old Cao, lonely and desperate after being abandoned by the married woman with whom he had struck up a romance, finds that he is suffering from a terminal disease. When the body of a woman found dredged up on a riverbank one night is brought into the crematorium, he makes plans to have her body taken to his hometown for burial, believing he is soon to join her.

But the arrival of the dead woman’s sister Xiuqiao, from whose search he at first tries to hide the body, is the point at which the human emotion and conflicts of modern society Peng explores in “The Cremator” are at their richest.

The unlikely pair fall into a mutually reliant friendship, colored and complicated by each character’s desperate need for money, and their battle with their own loneliness. “This is a very important point in Chinese history, with the conflicting and changing state of the economy, of our personal freedoms — there are points where life seems almost irreconcilable with itself,” said Peng.

The earliest example Peng found of these spirit wedings was the burial of a the legendary second century leader Cao Cao’s young son. The director was not only attracted be the idea of spirit weddings in themselves, but also by the way in which they remain relevant to people living in today’s China. “People in the countryside now have access to information, and they use it,” Peng says. “There is a big contrast between the phone, and what that wizard is wearing and doing, but he lives in the modern world too.”

And it is not only the conflicts between technology and growing consumerism with ancient traditions that the film addresses, it is also the battle with poverty that these people must endure in a rapidly developing country. “At every turn, Xiuqiao faces the problem that she cannot afford anything,” Peng says. “People from the countryside in China have the hardest lives. They live in a world where even dead bodies can fetch a price, and I hope that my film can say something about the complex relationship in China between money, morals and tradition.” 

Originally posted in Artinfo China.