I really wish noise musician/sound artist Randy Yau would do more stuff. His performance of the above piece in Beijing back in about 2003 or so really ripped my face off. It was awesome.

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My old colleague and fellow expat in Beijing, Jon Campbell, has been documenting, promoting, and participating in the Chinese rock scene for years. He’s since moved back to his native Canada, but he just wrote a pretty great history of Chinese rock music as it reflected and changed along with societal shifts in the Middle Kingdom.

Not willing to pay high Beijing rent, recent architecture school graduate Dai Haifei designed a cool-looking ‘egg house’ to sleep in outside of his studio. It smacks a bit of publicity stunt, but it’s actually a cool design that re-envisions how people might utilize urban space in the future.

Beijing-based electronic music duo FM3 have gone a long way with their Buddha Machine, a loop-playing box inspired by similar machines found in buddhist temples across China. They recently rolled out a new line with translucent colors as well as an app for your iPhone or iPad.

In my two years writing about the Chinese art scene in Beijing, I never saw anyone who did the kind of gothic, surreal work that Zhou Kui aka maomao does. Seriously amazing.

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I first saw noise musician Zbigniew Karkowski in Beijing several years ago, and I had the good fortune to be able to catch him recently when he came through Baltimore. Both times, the rather cagey and brooding Pole assaulted the audience with cement-rattling cacophony — the first time I saw him he used an analog synth, the second time he had a laptop — that was completely punk in its brevity, yet devastatingly expressive and effective, like a really satisfying punch into the sternum.

From the various responses I got from my previous post about hipster hate being misguided, most people defined a hipster as people who are very young (let’s say below 25), live off of their parents, and don’t contribute to the scene they glom onto. The problem I have with this is that in my personal experience, this is not how most people define hipsters.

Vice Magazine is usually derided as being a magazine made for and by obnoxious, overly irreverent hipsters, yet one cannot deny that they embody a certain scene altogether, and indeed contribute to the contemporary cultural landscape via their record label, their promotion of certain artists, and their video blogs covering everything from the Beijing rock scene and heavy metal in Iraq to sex tourism in Japan and the gigantic island of discarded plastic floating in the Pacific.

Indeed, Vice darlings Terry Richardson and the recently deceased Dash Snow are seen as the epitome of hipsterdom, yet Richardson is well into his 40s and both he and Snow are/were prolific photographers that most certainly were capable of paying their own rents in addition to supporting their massive drug habits. Many of the prolific artists in Baltimore, where I am, would be described as hipsters, regardless of how well they support themselves or the earnestness of their art, merely because they have mullets and child-molester glasses.

Still others who responded to my post suggested that irony was integral to the definition of a hipster, yet hip-hop kids today wear non-prescription nerd glasses, punks in the 70s wore torn school uniforms and swastikas, and peace-loving hippies before them wore army jackets, all as a sort of ironic inversion of what those cultural signifiers originally meant. When Kurt Cobain began the song Territorial Pissings with a line from The Youngbloods’ Get Together, he did it sarcastically.

A tattoo of Elmo may be retarded and intended as ironic, but had Sid Vicious grown up with Sesame Street, he too may well have gotten a similar image etched into his skin. That today’s 20- and 30-somethings have grown up more saturated with self-referential pop culture than any generation before is not their fault, and the sentiment behind a silly mustache may not be too far off from David Bowie wearing women’s boots, even if it is less classy.

Finally, I should qualify what I meant when I said that hatred towards hipsters was dangerously close to hatred towards immigrants – I didn’t mean to equate the two in terms of racial bigotry, but in both cases, people draw a line between who they consider insiders and who they consider outsiders. This line depends on a lot of stereotypes, generalizations, and assumptions that while not as virulent as ethnic hatred, are still on the same spectrum of reactionary prejudice.

Right now, the 2008 Beijing Olympics are cleaning up the mess left behind from the millions of people that passed through their city. Their forty billion dollar sporting event has come to a close and fans from around the world will take away memories of an interesting city that opened up to the world like it has never done before. One person in particular, who used China as a backdrop for his phenomenal photography project, was a French photographer by the name of Ambroise Tézenas. He made several visits to China between 2001 and 2005, taking truly innovative photographs. The subsequent book — Beijing: Theatre of the People — is a must, not just for lovers of Eastern culture and photography, but for people inquisitive about ‘a city caught between two worlds, an ancient past and a frenzied present’.
His work reminds me of Dan Holdsworth and Alec Soth, as Tézenas delves deep into the urban Chinese landscape, making some of his shots look otherworldly.

New York-based designer, and sometime Lost At E Minor contributor, Deanne Cheuk visited Beijing prior to the Olympics as part of the New Grand Tour. We touched in with her to see how she found the experience of being over there: ‘we visited some really modern art galleries, which seemed to be on par with with the best galleries in New York City’.

‘We also visited a cultural district where there were artists’ studios that had been built to give to artists to work in for free as a type of grant. It felt very cultural and advanced to me’.

How does the scene there differ from that elsewhere in the world?
‘China is growing like crazy, especially when we were in Beijing in the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics. I feel like the art scene there is just getting bigger and better’.

Do you feel that ‘art’ always had a unifying effect across cultures or does it actually accentuate differences?
‘I don’t think it was always unifying, but it has perhaps always been a way to cross some cultural barriers. I think it is one small way to unify cultures that is easily accessible’.

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In the lead-up to one of the most anticipated and controversial Olympic Games in Beijing, Boston.com cobbled together a bunch of surreal photos from the wires that depicts the hyper-sanitized, white-washed, and quasi-futuristic city Beijing has become.

New York-based designer — and occasional Lost At E Minor contributor — Deanne Cheuk returned recently from a visit to China where she snapped these awesome shots of Beijing.

The underground music scene in Beijing produces a lot of derivative and half-assed bands, but PK14 are great by any standards. The quartet, most of whom hails from the southern city of Nanjing (although drummer Jonathan Leijonhufvud is a Swedish national), plays catchy, charging postpunk in the vain of Television and Gang of Four. Their off-kilter beats, smart lyrics (which, unlike most other new Chinese bands, are in Mandarin), and blazing guitar parts earned them the distinction of being one of Time magazine’s 5 Asian Acts to Watch in 2008. The band was recently in Sweden recording their fourth album, which is due to be released any day now.