China's only seaside theater festival has been held in the resort town of Aranya in north China's Hebei Province. Artists from around the world traveled there to take deep dive into the world of dramatic performance. For theatergoers, there were interactive activities including cross-border installations such as seaside talks, environmental drama readings, screenings, theater houses, parades and bonfires by the sea.
Two pairs of dusty, pastel-orange roller skates. A ram's skull. Several meters of tangled, bright red rope. They aren't the sort of items you'd find in the great fashion houses of Europe or on North American catwalks.
But, for unconventional Chinese designer and performance artist Wan Yunfeng, they are perfect.
From his small apartment in eastern Beijing, Wan makes fashion that only he wears.
“I performed at Tiananmen Square in 1989, 15 days before the crackdown. I sang A Piece of Red Cloth (一块红布), a tune about alienation. I covered my eyes with a red cloth to symbolize my feelings. The students were heroes. They needed me, and I needed them. After Tiananmen, however, authorities banned concerts. We performed instead at “parties,” unofficial shows in hotels and restaurants”.
Young women in South Korea are fighting for a new future. The #MeToo movement which has highlighted sexual harassment and abuse around the world has taken a surprising hold in this socially conservative country.
The White Paper Movement was a large-scale, decentralized protest movement that erupted across China in late November 2022, initially sparked by a student demonstration at the Communication University of China, Nanjing.
World Microphone (世界麦克风) is an organization created by students (most of them are Chinese) located in London. The organization has an account in RED, which is a popular social media in China. It often holds interviews and movements on the street in London, talking about world culture, food, and travel. Then, it makes short videos based on these interviews and movements and posts the videos on RED.
The Guardian
By Tania Branigan
In the opaque world of Chinese censorship, a few red lines shine through the murk. One of the clearest is: no gossip about top political leaders, their families or internal party affairs.
She seeks to utilize her feminist art to spread awareness on mental health issues. Sravy is a nomad in her own right, and throughout her experiences in Asia she has noticed that there are stimas surrounding women's autonomy and how they handle mental health struggles.
Since 2020, university students across China have launched a grassroots initiative to combat menstrual stigma by placing “menstrual pad mutual aid boxes” in campus restrooms. These boxes, often accompanied by signs reading “Take one if you need it, donate if you can,” provide free sanitary pads to anyone caught off guard by their period—offering both practical relief and a symbolic challenge to the cultural silence surrounding menstruation.
A performance art piece by a student who sat in a cage to protest a draconian lockdown of the Beijing Film Academy (BFA) recently went viral, and was censored just as quickly. Like many other Chinese citizens, university students have been living under strict lockdowns, and are beginning to chafe at the restrictions—and at administrators’ lack of responsiveness to students’ concerns.
Ahead of a recent exhibition at the prestigious modern art museum OCAT Shanghai, the artist Song Ta described the process of creating his multimedia piece “Uglier and Uglier.” After secretly filming thousands of unsuspecting female college students, Song and three assistants painstakingly ranked them by their perceived attractiveness; those deemed most appealing featured early in the show, with the women on display getting progressively “uglier” as the
Kurokawa Cup is a protest against former head Tokyo prosecutor Hiromu Kurokawa's de facto immunity after he had played mahjong for money, which is an illegal act in Japan.
Several nights of Halloween celebration in Shanghai provided a vivid, if indirect, commentary this week on the malaise gripping the world’s second-largest economy.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s latest attempt to cultivate his image as a man of the people is creating some unintended consequences. Qingfeng Restaurant, an unassuming local eatery where Xi ate a meal of pork buns, fried pig liver and vegetables last month, has since become a staging ground for residents to protest against their local governments.
The immediate prototypes of Zhang Xiaogang’s Big Family series are formal group photographic portraits from the 1950’s and 60’s, including those of Zhang’s own family, a source of the painter’s “endless reveries.” From these old black-and-white pictures Zhang Xiaogang derived the series’ paradigmatic features: a subdued, nearly monochromatic palette; a thickly layered but flat surface, without overt evidence of brushwork; a general compositional restric
Thousands of ethnic Mongolians have protested across northern China in opposition to Beijing plans to replace the Mongolian language with Chinese in some school subjects.
Women in China are covertly resisting government crackdowns on discussions over their Me Too movement with a clever workaround.
The phrase “rice bunny” (米兔), pronounced as “mi tu,” has popped up on social media networks after censors removed posts that mentioned sexual harassment or the hashtag #MeToo. While those phrases are heavily monitored, Rice Bunny isn’t.
Leilei Zhang was harassed on a public bus when a man gripped her hand, glared at her and refused to let go. With the determination to raise public awareness, Leilei began a crowd-funding campaign to raise money for what could have been China's first public anti-sexual harassment advertisement. She approached the authorities of her home city, Guangzhou, but it did not want to take on the advertising for fear it would panic the public.
The following description is taken from the website of Aljazeera America (find link below):
In early December, Ju Hyun-u, a student at South Korea’s elite Korea University, taped up two white sheets filled with his handwriting on a campus bulletin board. His message began with a question, “Are you doing all right?”.
Cosmic Generator presents a network of characters working in nonsensical, and at times absurd, economies. Artist Mika Rottenberg uses footage from actual discount dollar stores in Calexico, CA; Mexicali, Mexico; and Yiwu, China to recreate the imaginary “life” of a product, from its production in the factory to the moment it is sold.
In early January, constructions workers in Wuhan, China staged a Gangnam Style protest in front of their employer's building. Using the Gangnam Style dance, the men sought to bring media attention to their mounting unpaid wages.
In 2016, Zhou Zhenfeng, who was a student at a college in Hebei at the time, discovered that there were a lot of waste tires in the streets and alleys. Zhou Zhenfeng learned that tires are made of infusible or refractory polymer elastic materials. It takes hundreds of years for these materials to decompose in the soil to the extent that they do not affect the growth of plants.
The “Occupy Men’s Toilets” movement, initiated by Chinese feminist activists including Li Tingting (Li Maizi) and Wu Rongrong, emerged in 2012 as a creative, non-violent protest against gender inequality in access to public facilities.