A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design
As Wuhan and other nearby cities in China remain in lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak, the normally festive Lunar New Year season is now beset with anxiety and grief. People across the country have taken to social media to share messages of concern, to share tips on…
Continue readingChinese Cartoonists Grieve, Pray & Respond to the Coronavirus Outbreak
Ahead of its sixth Crystal Ruth Bell Residency program (apply now – it’s fully funded!), the team at China Residencies took a cross-country tour around China to visit art and culture spaces new and old. Below we’re featuring photo highlights from this strip, which have been culled (with permission) from their lovely Instagram account.…
Continue readingPhoto essay: China Residencies’ 2019 cross-country tour of arts spaces
Hong Kong cartoonist Ah To has three claims to fame: as an internet culture expert, political cartoonist, and linguist of the Cantonese language. First, he rose to prominence after creating the Golden Creature Card game that celebrates the city’s internet culture. Then he built a career as a political cartoonist, with provocative comics that frequently go…
Continue readingCantonese.jpg: A boisterous, cartoon dictionary of idioms, proverbs and slang
Internet memes about social issues have a spotty history on China’s internet, where netizens have had to evade, obfuscate and mask their posts in an evolving game of censorship cat and mouse. This was the case with the infamous…
Continue readingAcceptable Protest: The 2019 workplace meme that’s thriving on China’s internet
This early excerpt from Open All the Buddha Boxes chronicles the rise of two seminal Beijing bands, Hang On The Box and Chui Wan, as they carve out a space for themselves in and outside of China. We follow members of the two bands as they develop their sounds, identities and aesthetics, and we see how they affect and are…
Continue readingAn illustrated love letter to the Beijing underground music scene
A young woman with big, circular glasses is nudged out onto the platform by the rivers of the passengers going in and out of the train. She finds herself at an unfamiliar stop, but close to home, and she is forced to take the night bus to complete her journey. The bus, and its inhabitants, have other ideas, taking her on a…
Continue readingNight Bus: journey through the fantastical Chinese countryside
Ping Pong Vol. 4 marks the Hong Kong publication’s continuing shift away from comics to the world of illustration. Titled Field Guide Collection, this latest volume finds its artists cataloguing various objects, behaviors and techniques through their drawings. As with the previous issue,…
Continue readingPing Pong 4: cataloguing explorations through illustration
City of Darkness (九龍城寨) chronicles the fall and rise of prominent gangster and martial artist 陳洛軍 (“Lok”) as he goes into hiding in the Kowloon Walled City after a bitter fight with his former boss. Set in a picturesque rendition of 1980s Hong Kong, City of Darkness pays homage to what co-creator Andy Seto calls the most beautiful…
Continue readingCity of Darkness: A macho Hong Kong comic exemplar set in the Kowloon Walled City
As the deadliest fire in California’s history rages on, we trawled through over 500 items on China e-commerce behemoth Taobao to find you the most stylish pollution masks on earth today. What we found was better than anything created by this Dutch designer or …
Continue readingCyberpunk Pollution Masks, Editor’s Picks from China