“I Just Want to Write”

Whether or not I deserved the Nobel Prize, I already received it, and now it’s time to get back to my writing desk and produce a good work. I hear that the 2013 list of Nobel Prize nominees has been finalized. I hope that once the new laureate is announced, no one will pay attention to me anymore.This is how 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan ended a recent speech at the second Sino-Australian Literary Forum in Beijing, where he shared the stage with 2003 laureate J.M. Coetzee. No doubt Mo Yan is trying to end the debate on whether the...

Lei Lei: A Sketch of the Animator As a Young Man

Lei Lei, a.k.a. Ray Lei, 27, is one of the best-known animators in China. Unlike many other smart kids of his generation who graduated from China’s top universities, he went off the beaten path early in his career and never turned back. In a country where many artists chase the latest trends in the international art market, Lei Lei sets trends of his own. His early animation—made from hand drawings on school notepads, is autobiographical and rooted in his upbringing. He wears chunky glasses and a pork pie hat, talks like a rapper...

Classical Music with Chinese Characteristics

On a frigid Friday morning at the end of 2012, a stream of expectant concertgoers poured through the cavernous lobby of the China National Center for the Performing Arts. They had come to the stunning, egg-shaped arts complex at this unusually early hour holding invitations to...

An Alternative Top Ten

Hong Kong’s Bard of the Everyday

 I have your words, that you put down on paperbut nothing at hand to return, so I write downpapaya. I cut one open: so many dark points, so many undefined things On Sunday, January 6, when Leung Ping-kwan, author of these lines, passed away, Hong Kong lost one of its...

Top Floor Circus

At nine o’clock on a recent Monday morning, Lu Chen, the slender and polite lead singer of Top Floor Circus, the first rock band to sing in Shanghainese—and a man whose transformative stage persona sees him swearing, stripping nearly naked, and engaging in exaggerated...

Remember to Tell the Truth

The recording of memory brings history to life and creates a legacy of its own. In 2010, documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang launched the Memory Project to try to shine a light on the long-shrouded memories of one of modern China’s most traumatic episodes—the famine of 1958-...

Wrapped Up: An Interview with Lin Tianmiao

Lin Tianmiao was born in Taiyuan, Shanxi in 1961 to an artistic family. Her father was a traditional painter and her mother a dancer. In the 1980s, she married video artist Wang Gongxin, moved to New York, and became a textile designer. It wasn’t until the couple moved back to Beijing in the mid-90s that Lin began her career as an artist. Her installation works are known for using images of herself and a laborious thread winding technique to direct attention to feminist issues of the body and women's domestic labor. The subtle...

A New Tower of Babel

Xu Bing, the renowned Chinese artist whose many laurels include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and an appointment as vice president of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, has long demonstrated a fascination with the written word.His groundbreaking work, Book from...

As Beautiful As Little Cats

Leap Editor's Note: In 1957, the filmmaker Agnès Varda assumed the role of photographer during a two-month journey around both urban and rural China with a delegation of French dignitaries. In 2012, her photographs from that trip appeared in “The Beaches of Agnès Varda in...

The Thinker

The SunHe could still recall his feelings the first time he saw the Siyun Mountain Observatory thirty-four years ago, when the ambulance crossed the mountain ridge and the main peak appeared in the distance, its domed telescope roofs reflecting the golden light of the setting sun...

What Gu Dexin Left

Last Saturday the museum I direct in Beijing opened a show by China’s most important contemporary artist you’ve never heard of, Gu Dexin. The opening however had one major difference from the star-studded affairs that have become commonplace in the Beijing art scene over the...

But Some of Us Are Looking at the Stars

The wild nature of a realist The moment that someone decides to write, if it’s truly miraculous, is often likened to a “flash of inspiration.” Haruki Murakami’s description of such a moment is a classic example, and whether true or not, it has a certain moving patina. He said: I was watching a baseball game when I decided to start writing; the team I support hit a home run and the ball flew fast and high across the sky. I stared at it and thought: I want to be a writer!When I told this story to Liu Cixin he immediately replied...

Novelist Chan Koonchung on China’s ‘Lack of Trust...

“I started to think about this book in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics,” says Chan Koonchung of his dystopian novel Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013 (The Fat Years). “2008 was the beginning of a new chapter for China, which is when I realized I had a story: the quake in...

A Rhythm of His Own

Huang Bo, founder and lead singer of the funk band The Verse, is a Chinese artist who looks to the West for musical and spiritual inspiration. Huang grew up in Changsha and moved to Guangzhou in the 1990s to study oil painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. It was there...

Wu Fei: An Authentic Voice

Wu Fei is a Beijing-born composer, vocalist, and guzheng (Chinese zither) player. Her music career tracks a journey from East to West and back again. Born into a musical family, she started playing guzheng as a child. After graduating from the China Conservatory of Music, Wu...

Three Poems by Han Dong

Foggy It’s foggy, or smoky Perhaps it’s smog No one’s surprised by that You can look straight into the sun, floating Like the moon in ashen clouds No one’s surprised by that This morning is no different from other mornings Yesterday and tomorrow are pretty much the same No one’s surprised by that Even on a clear day I can't see roadside trees and flowers clearly Even if I see them I don’t remember them Even if I remember them I can’t write about them If I’m not surprised by that, then No one else’ll be surprised...

Wuhan: Left Behind?

Many believe that Wuhan, a historic inland port city midway up the Yangtze River, is on the upswing. Yet a week of firsthand observation reveals a youth culture struggling to cope with the city's second-tier identity, leaving questions as to how the creative potential of similar...

China Through An Independent Lens

Chinese documentaries have gained global attention in the past decade or so, thanks partly to the creative originality of young filmmakers and partly to a rapidly changing China that fascinates viewers from around the world. Wang Bing’s nine-hour epic West of the Tracks (2003...

Under the Gingko Tree

Chongqing is western China’s only centrally administered city. A mountain town where two rivers meet, Chongqing is one of modern Chinese history’s most strategically important strongholds, and also one of the most important sources of contemporary Chinese art. It is a city...

Bishan Harvestival

One can almost imagine Bishan in its heyday. On the evening of August 26, 2011 the village’s daytime enthusiasm gushes towards the Yi County Cinema. It’s the kind of movie theater almost every small town has had, but Bishan’s has somehow managed to hang on to a 1980s or 90s feel. Above both the exits, in extremely serious-looking script, are the words “Emergency Exit.” Both the entrances are framed in brown wood, the left entrance for odd-numbered tickets, the right for even. On the white wall in between the entrances is a...

Our Time With Mu Xin

At three o'clock in the morning on December 21, 2011, the poet, writer, and painter Mu Xin passed away at the age of eighty-four in his hometown of Wuzhen. In this essay, two filmmakers from New York attempt to reconstruct the six days they spent interviewing the artist, as well...

Hong Kong's Own Art Fair

Late spring is art fair season, and last week's dramatic news that Art Basel, the best art fair in the world, will take ownership of Asia's new star Art HK has caught much of the art world by surprise. Under new ownership, the fair, already recognized as the premier contemporary...

The Educators

The question of art education in China, like just about every question in China, is a complicated one, tied to the myriad issues facing a society in the throes of a massive transition. There is no easy solution, and acknowledging the obstacles is a prerequisite to solving the...

Philosophies of Independence: The Li Xianting Film...

Riding the 938 bus out of Beijing’s Guomao station, the Central Business District gradually dissolves on the hour-long journey east to Songzhuang, giving way to a landscape not unlike that found in hundreds of county-level towns across China. An artist community on the city’s...