Translated excerpts from a PostShow blog post entitled “the 12 Taboo Ways of Using Chopsticks”:

1. 三长两短 Three long two short [an idiomatic expression that translates to “an unexpected misfortune”].
This refers to before or during meals, when a pair of chopsticks is not neatly put together with its ends matching. This is not…

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Check out one of Beijing/San Francisco artist Rania Ho’s relatively new projects: The Contractors.  The group makes music, videos, photos, concerts, and apparently can even lead a mean art tour (see their latest video). Their MySpace page is not to be missed.

We are inspired by other superstar building…

Continue reading“music for buying dark landscapes”: The Contractors

Youtube is a forum for independent media that could never get a voice in China. Low cost cut-and-paste TV news clips, with voice-overs and bilingual subtitles, will be an increasingly powerful tool for cross-cultural dialogue.  These types of DIY videos will also be rallying points in PRC 外的虚拟中国/Virtual China outside the PRC, for discussions that cannot take place openly online on the mainland, drawing a…

Continue readingPRC 外的虚拟中国/Virtual China outside the PRC: child labor on Youtube

37signals, the creators of Basecamp and other slick Web2.0 wares, has a post on their blog about how their software links up trendy, vinyl toy designers from Kidrobot in New York with Chinese manufacturers for cheap.

For 100 US dollars per month, “his team uses
Basecamp to share Illustrator files with engineers in China who…

Continue readingWeb2.0 ware links US designers with Chinese manufacturers

Nod Young is the art director/co-owner at Beijing-based Khaki Creative and Design and a graduate of the  Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua. Today, we shall feature three of his works that represent his forays into crossing the chasm between analog and digital design.

First up, using computer vector art to mimic and refine the aesthetic of …

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Was poking around Chinese video-sharing website 6rooms today and discovered a link (shown above) to the Chinese Animated Shorts Oscars!

I hunkered down and watched quite a few of them, which I’ll highlight before moving onto my conclusion:

生活原来是这样的 (Life is Actually Like This), by…

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From Chinese IT guru Keso’s Flickr stream, a t-shirt with the latest rallying cry against Chinese Internet censoring, most recently of Flickr itself: Fuck GFW (Great Firewall).  Above, in Chinese, followed by “Please use Tor”.  Tor is an anonymity network — a free service that, according to Tor’s website, works like this:

…

Continue reading“Fuc* GFW”: coming to a t-shirt near you

From citizen journalism site Moobol.com, this glimpse of parents and caretakers sleeping outside the doors of Beijing Children’s Hospital.  Translated text and selected comments below:

Late night, June 12 2007, over 100 parents of sick children, and some children themselves, sleep on the ground in the underground parking garage and on the disabled ramp…

Continue readingcitizen journalism: outside a hospital’s doors

Introducing: 漫漫看 (loosely translates as Read A Comic). The site allows you to view, online, page by page, the latest manga (= Japanese comic) releases. The text within these manga has already been translated into Chinese. There are similar sites in English, though they are much more underground than their Chinese counterparts.

The translated text is often traditional…

Continue readingThe flow of fan translated manga around the interweb

Chinese man. Builds robots. In his backyard. Some walk. Some pour tea. The latest pulls a rickshaw.

His wife of course, prefers that her husband spend her time more productively and make money rather than fidgeting with robots in the middle of the night, and sometimes burning down the house (happened once — didn’t stop him).

Spotted by the BBC, surprisingly…

Continue readingUneducated hobbyist builds backyard bots