This week’s photo theme is China Plaza Xmas: ostentatious Christmas mall displays in China’s mostly secular megacities.
We kick off with some photos taken recently by Radii’s own Fan Shuhong. This globe-topped Christmas tree currently resides in the plaza of the Taikoo Li South mall in downtown Beijing, cutting a striking profile between the two other mega-malls across the street, Topwin Center and Sanlitun SOHO.
The view from further in shows a seasonally-appropriate redding of the Apple store logo:
There’s also another, arguably more traditional Christmas display at this mall’s sibling, the slightly more upscale Taikoo Li North:
Stay tuned for more as the week progresses. It’ll get weirder.
This week’s photo theme is Red Raps: stills from recent hip-hop videos with “red” (read: patriotic) themes.
Rounding off this week’s photo theme of patriotic/pro-China rap images, we’re highlighting the costuming and visual design from Vava’s track My New Clothes, or as translated here, My New Swag.
We spotlighted the original video when we picked out the most fire debuts from the Rap of China freshman class, but apparently Vava’s been growing faster than her production team can manage, because this whole new video cut has come out since then, with 4.2 million views at time of writing.
The track’s title — “My New Clothes” — suggests a glow-up of some degree, and Vava tackles that theme in a distinctly Chinese way. We get a total Peking opera aesthetic. Masked figures come in and out, and Vava rocks a mix of regal garb and street chic. It reflects in the song itself, which heavily features an opera sample.
Maybe intentional, but it seems like pretty much everyone from Rap of China is picking up the deep China aesthetic at least once. It makes sense, with the stated intent of the show being to transform hip hop from a Chinese subculture to a mainstream genre, and to define what it means to be Chinese in hip hop. Viewers might remember crowd favorite Al Rocco being booted first round for failing to represent China.
In the end, we’re for the heavy China image. Gai in Chongqing and Vava in full on empress attire are dope. We’re pretty sure that we’ll be seeing more homegrown styles and old school cultural twists cropping up in future rap videos. Also more Beats pills.
This week’s photo theme is Red Raps: stills from recent hip-hop videos with “red” (read: patriotic) themes.
For today’s photo, we’re grabbing the pullback posse shot that closed out Gai’s music video, Hot Pot Soup Base. If you need to know more, we wrote up a Yin post a while back about the Rap of China co-champion and his track:
The thirty second shot is undeniably badass. You got the whole team posted up looking ready to ride. Gai reps his people and his hometown in the track, showing his patriotic side in a more nuanced way than some of our recent features (you might’ve noticed, but rap music has been identified as the medium of choice to drive nationalistic propaganda into the minds of youth). Some choice bars:
“You copy my flow/my clothes and my hat/as if all rap stars need VPN accounts/I’ve told you all your problems, go and think about yourself/you’re all pretending to be successful with no faith/the Chinese blood is running through my body/I hope you achieve a Grammy one day”
Editor’s note: This article by Christina Xu was originally published via her Multi Entry project, and has been re-posted here with permission. The following transcript is from a September 2015 interview conducted by Xu with a skater named KK at the Shapowei Art Zone Skate Park in Xiamen, after photographing his crew skating around one afternoon. Everything below is translated from Chinese.
KK: I’ve only been skating for two years, but it’s my whole life now. In high school I was into riding fixies and I didn’t know any skaters, but then I happened to ride by someone who was doing a super high ollie jump on a skateboard. I thought it was the coolest thing and have been skating ever since.
Now I skate almost every day, if not at this skate park then in the wild, on the streets and whatever cool spots we can find.
Two other members of KK’s crew
KK: These days, I basically only hang out with other skaters. When we’re not skating, we like to explore and find abandoned rooftops. Sometimes we bring our own beer and soundsystems and throw parties up there. We do “skate tours,” too — travel to other cities just to skate on their streets.
KK: I spend a lot of time on Instagram. It’s blocked in China, but we still use it a lot because we need to keep up with foreign skateboarders. The skating scene is still young here, so we have a lot to learn.
I’m studying injection molding design in college. I want to build my own skateboards someday.
This photoessay is a part of Multi Entry, a decentralized collection of stories & media about the creative young people of mainland China and the culture they’re creating.
This week’s photo theme is Red Raps: stills from recent hip-hop videos with “red” (read: patriotic) themes.
This sleeper hit has made the rounds a few times since dropping last year, but we feel it fits our weekly theme too snugly to avoid mentioning now, even though the title, “Marx is a Post-’90s (馬克思是個九零後)”, is a little awkward in translation.
Post-’90s (90后) refers to people born after 1990, and is a commonly used generational marker in Chinese society, distinguishing the youth of today from those post-’80s and post-’70s dinosaurs. (In fact, things are moving so fast that it’s common now to see the phrase “post-’95” thrown around, really driving home the granularity of China’s youth micro-cultures.) In very loose terms you might also understand the title as something like “Marx is a Millennial.”
Anyway, the “Marx is a Post-’90s” rap was initially posted to an official social media account of the Communist Youth League (where all these songs seem to originate) last March, and written by a young woman named Zhuo Sina, who told the paper Beijing Youth Daily at the time (as translated by Sixth Tone): “If this song could change students’ attitudes toward Marx and prompt greater willingness to learn about Marxism, then I think that’s a good thing.”
The song includes lines like I don’t read magazines, I read Marx and I was born in the 1990s / I am your Bruno Mars / But you are my Venus / My dear Marx, and you can stream it in full here:
This week’s photo essay is by Kristen Ng, a Chengdu-based promoter and musician who runs the offbeat touring label Kiwese, facilitates live music programming at NU SPACE Chengdu and performs electronic music as Kaishandao. She’s selected seven snaps from her recent nationwide tour with New Zealand’s The All Seeing Hand: hardcore slow train tour life.
Fish and seafood were laid out for sale in plastic containers by the roadside, while chickens pecked about in the dust beds. We’d arrived in sunny Xiamen for the inauguralYa Festival (哑艺术节), held at a temple in the sleepy Mainland village district of Houtian. Children chased each other through winding paths. Skyscraping apartment developments loomed near. The suntanned local villagers all spoke Hokkien, a dialect completely unintelligible to Mandarin speakers. Festival organizer Dao greeted us in the square with a huge smile. He had “哑” tattooed in red across his Adam’s Apple.
Here’s a photo of artist Wu Gang performing as Jesus on the Cross next to Houtian Temple at Ya Festival. He remained tied to the cross for over three hours. The previous night, I had woken up on the floor of Gebi in a wedding dress. By the time we reached Xiamen, I was a total wreck. Note me on the right, self-medicating with a can of Rio Strong. Citrus flavored, full of nutrients.
At around 8pm, E N T was chanting occult drone poetry with a black balaclava over his head. Dao was covered in blood, having just performed improvised saxophone while his girlfriend tattooed his back (see up top). Mortified, the locals demanded a stop to the festival, citing ancestral disruption. Fair enough.
The temple had an open roof and the village had probably never experienced anything louder than a truck horn in all its hundred-year history. The All Seeing Hand isn’t exactly an easy listening band. If they performed their ritualistic live show in the temple with drums and throat singing all dressed in black, there’d be hell to pay. Just seeing the amplifiers on the altar upset the elderly villagers to no end. Jesus had since removed himself from the cross.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
TOUR TIP #6: Citrus flavored Rio Strong is not a substitute for actual fruit.
STORIES
Menu
VIDEOS
Menu
ABOUT
Menu
Menu
CATEGORIES
VIDEOS
ABOUT
NEWSLETTER
Get weekly top picks and exclusive, newsletter only content delivered straight to you inbox
