八八吧 · 88 Bar – Page 3 – A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design

Photo essay: China Residencies’ 2019 cross-country tour of arts spaces

July 10, 2019 by Jason Li

Montage of our photos of people and art in China

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

Chinese Comics Review

Cantonese.jpg: A boisterous, cartoon dictionary of idioms, proverbs and slang

May 27, 2019 by Jason Li

Two covers for the Cantonese.jpg books, featuring a cartoon chicken reading/eating Cantonese text

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

China Meme Report

Acceptable Protest: The 2019 workplace meme that’s thriving on China’s internet

May 21, 2019 by Jason Li

Photo of a booklet of China's labor laws taped onto the glassdoor of Ant Financial — Anonymous selfie of person giving Ant Financial/Alibaba a booklet of China’s labor laws. Source: 996action GitHub repo.

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

Chinese Comics Review

An illustrated love letter to the Beijing underground music scene

May 7, 2019 by Jason Li

Cover image of Open All The Buddha Boxes (excerpt)

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

Stop Calling It A Cold War

February 18, 2019 by Graham Webster

From Technology Review’s The US and China aren’t in a “cold war,” so stop calling it that, by Graham Webster:

Unlike the US and USSR, in which science and technology developed on largely independent tracks, the US and China are part of a globally intertwined ecosystem. As an example, ZTE, the Chinese maker of network equipment and smartphones, was…

Continue readingStop Calling It A Cold War

An Anthology of Naked Underground Chinese Comics

February 13, 2019 by Jason Li

I started working with Orion at Paradise Systems a few months ago, and ICYMI we launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish an anthology of semi-illicit, nudity-flaunting comics from China:

Naked Body is a 100-page, full color anthology edited by Yan Cong. It began life a few years ago when Yan Cong was told by…

Continue readingAn Anthology of Naked Underground Chinese Comics

The Internet’s Warring States Period

January 29, 2019 by An Xiao Mina

From Foreign Policy’s The War-Torn Web, by Sean McDonald and An Xiao Mina:

Contention on how the internet should be run isn’t new. Some have identified this as a world of parallel internets, or rifts in the vision of how the internet should operate. But the gulfs in governance and action opening up and the active efforts to influence…

Continue readingThe Internet’s Warring States Period

Chinese Comics Review

Night Bus: journey through the fantastical Chinese countryside

January 15, 2019 by Jason Li

Cover image of Night Bus

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

Starting Up in Shenzhen

Shenzhen Everywhere

January 8, 2019 by An Xiao Mina

Excerpted from the MIT Technology Review’s Inside Shenzhen’s race to outdo Silicon Valley by An Xiao Mina and Jan Chipchase:

In much the same way that open-source software enables a global community of developers to copy and remix each other’s work, rapidly creating variants on a piece of software to meet different needs, the shanzhai method delivered “hardware…

Continue readingShenzhen Everywhere

Chinese Comics Review

Ping Pong 4: cataloguing explorations through illustration

January 7, 2019 by Jason Li

Table display of candy, caricatures and collected trash objects — Objects and drawings from the Ping Ping Vol. 4 exhibition opening

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