Tag: Guangzhou

26/06/25 Committed to Tape

Demos and Cassettes for China’s New Music

The history of popular music in China from the 1970s to the mid-2000s is dominated by dakoudai1 – the excess cassettes (and later CDs) shipped to China for recycling. These were diverted upon arrival into the eager hands of a population finding their own voices after the strictures of the Cultural Revolution. But the new sounds Chinese artists were making needed to find their listeners. Demo cassettes provided one route for artists to reach critics, record companies and, ultimately, a new public.

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24-06-06 Archive Display #2: new additions

This is the second in a series of posts recording my efforts to organise and present my research archive of publications related to experimental music and sound art from Mainland China and Hong Kong. Today’s post brings us up to date with the current selection on display. These are the most recent items received for the archive, some old, some new, with a little background to each item.

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ArtReview Asia: Xu Tan – Questions, Soil and ‘Socio-Botanic’

Xu Tan: Questions, Soil and ‘Socio-Botanic’

Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou

19 August – 22 November

Displaying a long-term commitment to his practice, most visible for the last six years in the ongoing Keywords Project, Guangzhou-based Xu Tan chooses to address both the detail as well as the ‘bigger picture’ of cultural and social change through his works. His current solo show in Guangzhou’s Vitamin Creative Space, titled Questions, Soil and ‘Socio-Botanic,’ shifts the subject matter from language—as demonstrated by Keywords—to issues of the conceptual and legal construction of the social landscape.

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艺术界LEAP: No Ground Underneath: Curating on the Nexus of Changes

Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou

2–4 July, 2012

Curating needs a bit of a shake down in China. The term has become a cliché to describe pretty much any situation in which one can point to a modicum of organisation, and is often characterised as a perfunctory look at the issues raised. Seminars that take a long hard look at the subject, and successfully integrate local and international resources and audiences, are also pretty rare in this context. So, despite the Summer heat in Guangzhou, we couldn’t refuse the invitation of the Guangdong Times Museum to attend their “No Ground Underneath: Curating on the Nexus of Changes” which brought together practitioners from near and far in an extended forum over three days of intensive presentations and discussions.

Nikita Yingqian Cai, curator of the Times Museum, in collaboration with the seemingly ubiquitous independent curator and critic Carol Yinghua Lu, co-curated this event as a prelude to a new series of books on the general subject of curation, to be published by the Museum beginning later this year.

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