Pangbianr 旁边儿 has soft launched pangbianr radio, a series of podcasts on art & culture in China. The first episode is “On Building Electronic Devices During The Cultural Revolution,” an interview with a woman who dabbled in making radios during that technology-starved era.
Highlights include an account of how she was the only woman at the black market for electronics components during the Cultural Revolution, as well as her having to build extra radios for her extended family, even when the thrill of building as a hobby was long gone.
Neocha EDGE is running a feature on the Beijing-based studio Redesign, who are doing some excellent and elegant work in the Chinese fonts space. Their fonts have appeared in Pizza Hut ads as well as on the cover of Cosmo in China.
Each font for personal use costs ￥99元, and annual subscriptions for commercial use start at ￥1,999元. More details here.
PANGBIANR 旁边儿 is a “platform for exploring the lived culture of making art, music, film & food in China.” So far they have a Twitter presence, a blog and some events coming up.
Chinese rock was finished very early on. Without spirit, without a core, rock music can’t exist. Western rock music is a huge structure: from economics to culture, the influence is quite deep.
And see here for the details for their indie music & film festival on July 25th in Beijing.
Riding off of the wave of momentum out of ARTHK10, the local art community in Hong Kong has opened a new blog reporting on and reviewing local events. It’s an impressive effort so far and will no doubt further their bid to make Hong Kong the fine art capital of Asia.
This post also appears on World Wide Pop, my latest project featuring pop & indie culture from all over the world. I’m posting this here because it reports on something from China.
I first discovered I am MT (我叫MT, 2009-1010) while reading an article about the Tudou Video Festival Awards 2010. Tudou is one of China’s Youtube clones and its annual awards ceremony was once dubbed by a friend as China’s Sundance Festival. While this claim is probably not accurate, it does show that online video in China is a big deal. And within the 2010 Tudou awards, the team behind I am MT garnered the the most popular video blogger award.
Currently airing its third season, I am MT is an animated online TV series that is set loosely in the universe of the World of Warcraft (a giant online game where lots of people play together to kill monsters, one another and then level up). Each episode is 24 minutes long and features various cute SD characters hanging out, fighting one another and questing within the game’s world. The plot has elements of both medieval fantasy and slapstick humor.
Aside from slapstick, it also employs what people in China call e-gao humor. E-gao has been translated as “spoofing”; it’s a type of parody that borrows heavily from the original cultural work. In this case, I am MT makes fun of the World of Warcraft setting as well as borrowing theme songs and visual elements from Japanese pop culture.
Unfortunately, I find the writing weak and the pacing erratic. But then again, as a non-World of Warcraft player, I’m not the target audience. See for yourself though, all episodes starting from season two have subtitles in both English and Chinese.
The original story is that she rose to fame back in 2005 when she posted mock-provocative photos of herself on major BBSs/forums. These photos were accompanied by quotes such as “I have a physique that gives men nosebleeds.”
But I learned recently that her fame was partially manufactured and that she wasn’t just some random girl posting photos of herself online. The person who shot her photos and helped market her now runs an internet marking company that pays people to generate buzz around internet celebrities.
On average, it costs about 3,000 yuan ($440) to pay netizens to leave just one post on more than 3,000 online forums – and with a large enough budget, marketers can almost guarantee that their client will become an Internet sensation.
The article continues to say that now that Sister Lotus is popular but only as a target for mockery, and it’s hard for her to move beyond that. This is despite the fact that she “now has a personal assistant and is represented by Beijing Furong World International Culture and Media, an Internet marketing firm.“
So perhaps the photo above is a poor attempt at changing her image?
I’ve been a fan of Nciku’s langauge learning services for a while now, most notably their core dictionary service. So when they came out with a new experiment today, I’m more than happy to plug it:
You can read Peter the Rabbit, online, for free, in English or Chinese. You can have the words, or have it read out loud for you.
I would have preferred a side-by-side, but so far you can only do a hard swap one from language to the other.
88 Bar is about finding bits and pieces in virtual China and examining them from the various lenses of our authors:
Lens 1: Designer
Jason Li has worked as an interaction designer, illustrator and researcher. Originally from Hong Kong, he has also lived in Canada, the US and Spain. He's writing a graphic novel in his spare time.
Lens 2: Cultural anthropologist
Lyn Jeffery is a research director at the Institute for the Future. She has spent more than 20 years living, working, and doing research in China.
Contact us if you're interesting in becoming one of our lenses.
