Sweet spinning robots! Beijing-based startup Vincross has just launched a Kickstarter campaign for its flagship product, HEXA, which is described as a “Programmable, Highly Maneuverable Robot.” In fact it is a slightly creepy spider-bot that can write it’s own name and kinda climb stairs as retro-futuristic synthesizer music tinkles in the background:
Ok, ok… it’s not a spider, it only has six legs. It’s a hexapoda-bot. Moving on.
Here’s TechNode with a solid synopsis of what HEXA actually does:
HEXA can walk, climb and carry things, navigating with a 720p camera, night vision, a gravity sensor, three-axis accelerometer, distance measuring sensors (lasers), infrared transmitter and has other features such as WiFi and multiple ports for add-ons and connections. It has even beaten Apple to wireless charging.
In addition to HEXA, Vincross has also developed MIND, an operating system and software development kit for the tinkerers and makers of the world to more easily program their own funky robotic behaviors.
If this sounds like you, scope out HEXA’s Kickstarter below (click the “K” in the video). And do it kinda soon — they exceeded their $100k fundraising goal within days of launching the campaign, and have a limited supply of HEXA’s to spread around the early adopter community.
Editor’s note: This article by Rita Liao was originally published by TechNode. It has been re-posted here with permission.
“It’s probably the most popular live streaming platform in China at the moment, but also the most vulgar,” writes the user who started the provocative thread with screenshots showing Kwai users eating rats, dancing in skimpy clothes, and other behavior that might be straight-up insane or obscene for the cultivated urbanites. As of now, the question has more than 3.8 million views and over 1,000 replies.
Vulgar or not, Kwai has brought the focal point of city elites to the rarely discussed but colossal population living in China’s lower-tier cities and rural areas.
China’s tech giants have long seen the opportunities in lower-tier cities as the urban markets saturate and the geographic center of China’s middle class begins to shift. In March, Tencent made a $350 million strategic investment in Kwai—the app “for ordinary people” as described (in Chinese) by Tencent’s CEO Pony Ma. According to a study by McKinsey & Company, the share of China’s middle class in megacities will fall to 16 percent by 2020, down from 40 percent in 2002.
Over half of Kwai’s users live in Tier 3 and 4 cities, says a report by Questmobile in March. Some respondents to the Zhihu thread express concerns over the decadent, lewd minds of small-town Chinese. Others, however, point out that not everyone on Kwai, or in China’s small cities, entertain obscene tastes. If you keep liking obscene content then certainly, Kwai’s smart algorithm will show you more obscene content, one respondent taunts.
“Of course, the more inciting the content, the more popular it will get,” says Beizai, a 28-year-old Kwai user who works as a sushi chef in Zhongshan, a city south of Guangzhou. Beizai’s sushi-making clips have won him more than 100k followers.
“I like to use Kuaishou because everyone is equal here. Anyone can attract fans, as long as their work is good,” says Wang Xiaodou, a 31-year-old farmer in Zoucheng, a small city near the birthplace of Confucius in Eastern China. Wang, who stopped attending school beyond the fourth grade, started using Kwai a year ago because “friends recommended it.”
Her husband uses Oppo—a popular smartphone brand in China’s lower-tier cities, to film Wang’s daily life, from toiling in the potato field to stoking a fire and making hand-made dumplings. Many of her 500k followers ended up adding her on WeChat, thanking her for documenting moments of the peaceful country life.
“It reminds them of their own childhood life,” says Wang, who came back to the village to take care of her husband who can’t leave home because of a major surgery.
Wang is not alone in this kind of reverse migration. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), China’s migrant population has been in decline since 2015. As of 2016, there are 245 million migrant workers across the nation, 1.71 million fewer than a year ago.
On the contrary, the number of rural migrant workers (农民工)—workers with a rural household registration (户口) who are employed in a city—working locally near their home area has risen by 26% over the past seven years. This in part is due to the slowing income growth for migrant workers in the more prosperous Eastern China. Data from NBS shows that between 2011 and 2016, annual growth rate of monthly income for rural migrant workers dropped from 21.2% to 6.6%.
“No, why would I go to the big cities?” Beizai says. His hometown Hezhou is a 3.5-hour bus ride away, so he can visit his family easily. He is moving back to Hezhou in a few days, for even housing prices in Zhongshan has grown unaffordable with the expected opening of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge that will make idyllic Zhongshan a second home for the affluent Shenzhen residents.
Other tech giants have also followed the Chinese migrants home. Weibo, once touted as the Twitter of China with a similarly elitist, urban crowd, switched to a lower-tier city, video and live stream-focused strategy following its fall from past glory. In 2014, CEO Wang Gaofei proclaimed his vision (in Chinese) for a comeback plan: “If we want to reach 300 million monthly active users and 100 million daily active users, where would these users come from?” The answer lies in second, third, and even fourth-tier cities, he told his employees in an internal meeting.
While first-tier cities have largely reached smartphone penetration maturity, lower-tier cities were still seeing double digit growth in 2014, according to Nielsen’s research. Weibo has seized this population by pre-loading its app into partnered low-end smartphones.
The NASDAQ-listed company’s rural pivot has proven successful. From 2015 to 2016, Weibo’s MAU grew 66.2% to 312 million (in Chinese), mainly driven by an expanding Tier 3 and 4 user base. On August 9, the company hit a $20 billion valuation (in Chinese) for the first time, with revenue growing at 79% year on year to RMB 1.73 billion ($260 million). Alibaba-backed Momo, once widely considered the “Chinese Tinder”, has also successfully ramped up its Tier 3 and 4 (in Chinese).
Like Beizai, Wang has no regrets over leaving China’s megacities where many have struck it rich. “Everyone has their own desires. For me, being with my family is the biggest source of happiness,” she says, then excuses herself from our WeChat conversation as it’s time to take off for the field.
The multimedia work of contemporary artist Li Jinghu revolves around his hometown, Dongguan, a cluster of farming villages near Hong Kong that in recent years has transformed into a manufacturing hub staffed by migrant workers from all over China.
After launching his career in the nearby — though much more cosmopolitan — megacities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Li moved back to his hometown over a decade ago, and has remained in Dongguan ever since. To describe him as the city’s first contemporary artist might be technically accurate. One generation removed from a time when the vast majority of Dongguan’s residents were farmers, art as a profession is neither understood nor respected by the community.
Nevertheless, Li is determined to stay in Dongguan and help cultivate its nearly non-existent contemporary art scene. In 2014 he founded the site-less “Three No Gallery” (三无画廊), offering non-professional creators a platform outside the established art system. The name references the segment of the Chinese migrant worker population who lack official identification papers, residency permits, and stable income. More recently, he started an artist residency program with support from a partner named Echo.
Beijing and Shanghai still dominate the Chinese contemporary art world, in terms of both artists and collectors. Government support for the arts is largely reserved for more traditional disciplines. What motivated Li to become the de facto champion of contemporary art in Dongguan, a city so far removed, in every sense of the word, from the cultural zeitgeist?
The farms Li pilfered fruit from as a schoolboy turned into the factory of the world before his eyes
Li is the son of an orphaned father and an illiterate mother, both byproducts of China’s liberation movement, during which the Communist party persecuted landowners such as his family. When he was five, he looked up at the night sky and wondered, “Who am I?” This lifelong existential search for meaning led him to choose contemporary art over more stable professions after graduating university. For Li, art is more than a job — it’s a form of therapy.
Li’s family saw their fortunes nearly lost, regained, lost and regained again in a matter of decades, in parallel with the political upheavals that have plagued much of modern Chinese history. The farms he pilfered fruit from as a schoolboy turned into “the factory of the world” before his eyes. He wants to use art to make sense of this disconnect, and he wants outside artists to join him, which is partly why he initiated a residency program.
He also wants to make art accessible to the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who call Dongguan home. One of his unrealized projects is to turn the city into a museum by exhibiting art in public spaces such as bus TV screens, abandoned buildings, and outside factories. Li had informal government support for this idea, until the official he was working with left their post.
For Li Jinghu, art is more than a job — it’s a form of therapy
On the day I arrive in Dongguan, Li shows me around town before we pay a visit to Ah Yang, his childhood friend and a self-taught artist who first encountered contemporary art through Li’s various outside visitors. Ah Yang’s claim to fame is a criminal past that includes serving eight years in prison for a botched kidnapping. The soft-spoken former gang leader is baby-faced and fashionable, with a perm. Though he is currently earning a living through odd jobs — beer distributor, loan shark — Li encourages him to continue making art, and may have even landed him a show with a New York gallery.
The following day, I attend the public unveiling of new work by Li and Echo’s artists-in-residence. A young artist named Liu Xinyi, working together with his wife and fellow artist Gu Ying, were given a place to stay, access to a car, a budget of around $150, and one month’s time to create an exhibition for a 2,000-square-meter space. The exhibition venue, car, and living space were provided by Echo, an art enthusiast who Li met through mutual acquaintances and convinced to co-organize the residency.
Fewer than 20 people show up — friends, independent media, the director of Dongguan Culture Center, a local primary school art teacher, a recent art school graduate, Echo’s husband, and myself. Despite the small turnout, the artists seem content. There is a sense that something is growing. Li forms a WeChat group with all our contacts and names it the “Dongguan Contemporary Art Association.”
After the event, Li and I sit in a tea room in the lobby of the attached hotel for a long talk about his art, his thoughts on the future of Chinese society, and the nature of creativity.
Philana Woo for Radii: Does creativity stem from internal or external forces?
Li Jinghu: Both, but the most important factor ultimately comes from within. Sensitive people may derive greater inspiration from their surroundings. It’s different for everyone.
Are you a pessimist or an optimist?
I think I am both. Being a pessimist led me to become an optimist. When you are pessimistic, you see life clearly. For instance, after I graduated from college, I could have had a very stable job. I saw my entire life laid out before me on this established path: normal, stable job, not much fun, then you’re old and not sure what to do with yourself. But this is a rather depressing and pessimistic view of life. If you’re optimistic, you believe it is possible to change the course and achieve something different. The willingness to endure negative aspects of an unconventional life path requires faith and optimism. Optimism is the will to create change.
Are you proactive or passive when it comes to creativity?
I would say active, because no one needs my art. There is no external force demanding or requiring me to create art; it’s an internal need. My art isn’t going to result in some external change. There is no one depending on my art, except for myself. I remember when I decided to become an artist — it was so I could answer some questions I had about life and the universe. I wanted to know the reasons for certain personal problems, and become a more balanced person. So this was a proactive need on my part.
“There is no external force demanding or requiring me to create art; it’s an internal need” — Li Jinghu
What inspires you? Do you have an internal voice or muse?
Yes. As I mentioned before, prior to university, I didn’t know what I wanted in life. Before graduating, I started thinking about what type of person I wanted to be. I was exposed to contemporary art around that time, and felt it was something that could help me solve some of my personal issues. I didn’t want to lead a conventional life.
I believe art has a greater capacity to help me solve some of life’s problems compared with a normal job — existential questions like, Who am I? What’s my life’s purpose? Why are people the way they are? Why do people I know suffer from the problems they do? Questions regarding relationships, life and death, history, family, etc. Art is a platform for exploring these questions. I valued this more than a very stable life. This is why I chose to become an artist.
Speaking of a stable life, you are married with three children, in a marriage arranged by your parents. Is this contradictory to your identity as a contemporary artist?
I don’t think there’s a contradiction. It’s part of my life plan. I wanted to lead the life of an ordinary local without doing an ordinary job. I wanted to do it as an artist, to see things through an artist’s perspective. It’s quite amusing. I don’t want to be completely removed from the outside world. I still want to be of this place.
“I wanted to lead the life of an ordinary local without doing an ordinary job”
Was this the reason you chose to move back to Dongguan? You could have stayed in Shenzhen or moved to Beijing or Guangzhou to be closer to the art world.
That’s right, but I would be removed from my upbringing, and that is not what I wanted for my art. I wanted to approach it from my personal background. The point of my art is to create interactions with the people and events around me, to help generate answers to some questions I have about life. This includes understanding the life of the people around me. In order to do this, I must be immersed in their environment and live similarly.
How do you find inspiration?
I usually approach it with a normal life attitude. It’s only at 2 or 3 in the morning, or when my wife and kids are away, when I’m awake alone, that I adopt an artist’s mentality to think about things. It’s during these times that thoughts slowly accumulate and form a lingering sound in your mind; that is when I am in my creative zone. Eventually something presents itself clearly in my mind’s eye, and one day becomes a work of art. That is the best creative state for me.
Do you have any heroes or icons?
Yes, mostly the elderly in my family. I once wrote a family genealogy by documenting oral histories from some of the older relatives, including the great aunt who raised me. I recorded events that took place before I was born. I learned why certain relatives have certain personalities and anxieties. To me, it was a very interesting way of figuring out why people are the way they are. Ever since we were little, we interacted with these older relatives, who taught us a lot. I really looked up to the elderly in the family. They have lived through so many different experiences in their lifetimes, yet maintain an optimistic life philosophy.
Were they farmers as well?
Actually, my great-grandfather was a landowner, but he became addicted to opium so my great aunt, his daughter, started managing the household from the age of nine. She was a savvy businessperson who saved the family from financial ruin. At 18, she started believing in Christ. Sorry, this is a really long story…
My great aunt’s paternal grandmother was Buddhist, and always counted her beads. At the time, the village hospital was not very good. Some of her siblings died at a young age, so her mother started praying to Buddha from when she was young. When she was 18, she went to her first church service in Humen Town. The preacher said that God does not require gifts, because that was too worldly. This resonated with her, so she destroyed all the Buddhas in her home. But she had had three years of schooling and could write, so she was well known. Later on, she arranged for my grandfather and their cousins, who were 10 and 20 years younger, respectively, to attend church. When she was in her 30s, China was liberated by the Communists, and they lost everything. But her younger siblings had attended school, including her brother, my grandfather, who the village head would treat to lunch whenever she came home, bringing a gun and all that. Her brother and sister also became doctors, so they had status.
These were the siblings of your paternal grandfather?
Yes, and later he became a principal as well. But because we were landowners, he was executed. His siblings did quite well in school, and his younger brother eventually went to Hong Kong and became a successful factory owner. Because of him, our life was quite comfortable.
Are you religious?
No, but as a child, I attended church regularly with my great aunt. Religion did set an ethical standard for us, so even though we didn’t necessarily believe, we tried to behave in a moral way.
How does religion influence your art?
Most of my aunts weren’t religious until they reached old age. Even my illiterate mother recently delayed her return from Hong Kong because she wanted to attend church. It has become a family tradition.
What would you do if you weren’t an artist?
I guess I would be quite boring, someone who gambles and eats the days away. This is not what I want.
Do you think you’re different from other people in Dongguan?
Yes, actually, in the decade plus since I’ve been back, there’s not a single person I can have a conversation with, because we care about different things and have nothing in common. It’s quite lonely. At the same time, I can do what I want because no one is paying attention. It’s a refuge.
Do you have any unrealized projects?
Yes, I have many, especially in Dongguan, where everything changes too quickly. When I was young, my friends and I would steal fruit from farms where factories and roads are now. I have a very intimate relationship with this place, yet feel a growing disconnect. So I must use art to explore why it has been this way in order to reconnect.
I also want outside artists to document and consider the same questions, but from their unique perspective. This is why I created “Three No Gallery” (三无画廊), a non-professional gallery with neither site nor staff. Everything you know changes, and nothing you’ve known changes. I wanted to give friends a platform to make and exhibit art, see how they view art and how I see art through them. Art has served as an important conduit between my friends and me. Friends who don’t know art, but get it.
One of my ideas was to turn our entire village into a museum, including public spaces like buses, bus stops, the cargo containers in front of factories that migrant workers walk past daily, and busy intersections. I want to disrupt the museum model. A lot of people around me are low-income and busy migrant workers, so I want to bring art to their daily lives. The government was supportive [at first], but that’s changed due to staff turnover.
“One of my ideas was to turn our entire village into a museum, including public spaces like buses, bus stops, the cargo containers in front of factories that migrant workers walk past daily”
Is your family supportive of your decision to be an artist?
Actually, no. They think I’m wasting my time. Considering the context, people are still very practical. Until money is no longer a concern, intellectual issues will remain a non-issue, including art.
What about your great aunt?
She didn’t understand either, but was fine as long as I wasn’t doing anything illegal.
Your wife?
Same — as long as I don’t gamble or patronize prostitutes, and am able to support the family, she doesn’t mind.
Your kids?
They don’t really understand. They just know I draw. But I think it’s very important to their upbringing, because they are able to see how I deal with issues differently through art, and eventually they may be able to understand. It’s about the legacy.
You mentioned your grandparents’ generation already. What about your parents?
They are very different, because they came of age after liberation. They were the most repressed and depressed. When I was little, I always wondered why my father was so depressed. In an act of self-preservation, he avoided interacting with people, and this had an impact on me and my siblings, particularly my older brother.
What about your mother? You mentioned that she’s illiterate. Was your parents’ marriage arranged?
Yes. My mother had nine siblings. She was the eldest and had to work, so never attended school. She was very industrious, but because she was uneducated, she didn’t have the capacity to approach things intellectually. I also want to change this with art, change our family.
What were mealtimes in the household like?
We weren’t allowed to talk. That’s what I mean when I say things get passed down. Even with my own family, I don’t really talk with my wife. It’s very influential.
Your parents wanted you to be a businessman.
But of course I didn’t want to be that.
What about your brother?
He was a very good student, but he had personality problems and suffered from depression.
Was there any one event that has had a particularly strong influence on you?
When I was five or six, one day, when I was home, moonlight was shining down through the skylight. I suddenly thought, Who am I? I think it had to do with my great aunt praying — I had this idea that God resided in the sky and could see me, yet I could not see myself, so maybe God sent me to experience life. I forgot about this until later in university, when I was exposed to contemporary art, and thought it could help solve this problem. Nothing else appealed to me.
What was your life like growing up?
I was happy, mostly because of my great aunt. Prior to liberation, she was a successful businessperson. But after, when they had lost everything, she switched gears and adopted a positive attitude. She was nice to everyone. She was the best clothing maker and a good chef. During the holidays, everyone came to her for new clothes. She was also knowledgeable about Traditional Chinese Medicine, which also made her very popular. Even though she had a lot of pressure to support the family, she prayed daily. God and prayer were her only release. I think I learned a lot from her.
How do you increase your creativity and imagination?
Rituals or practice. It depends on my environment. I need to spend time away from home every quarter or half year to get clarity. That is a very important stage in my creative process.
What are some key differences between creativity in China vs the West?
The difference is very obvious. In China, it’s Confucian and conservative, with an emphasis on the student-teacher relationship and tradition. Rebellion is frowned upon. But in the West, rebellion is encouraged, because innovation is achieved through questioning the status quo. But in China innovation isn’t necessarily desirable.
So much of contemporary art is about transcendence and disruption. How do you reconcile this with Chinese culture?
The contradiction is quite big. But unlike older generations, we received a lot of Western influences in our education. So we have a better foundation for change compared with older generations.
It seems that a lot of young Chinese are becoming interested in traditional culture and crafts. Perhaps it is the organic evolution, after absorbing from the West, they return to their own tradition.
Yes, but I think it’s still from a utilitarian angle. I am still thinking about what solves my own problem.
How would you describe your biggest life problem?
WHY AM I LIKE THIS, WHY AM I LIKE THIS.
What do you mean by that?
It includes my attitude, how I engage with the outside world, and how the outside world engages with me.
How would you encourage children to be more creative?
I don’t agree with that approach. Kids naturally have different interests. Everyone is different. You can’t ask someone to be one way. If they like something, you should give it to them.
What is your greatest fear?
That I die suddenly. I won’t be able to support my family. There’s nothing besides that.
Are you optimistic about the future of China?
No, because it started from zero or nothing, so of course everyone is happy with the progress. But when you get to a certain point of progress, spirituality will become more important, and the economy can’t help that.
“When you get to a certain point of progress, spirituality will become more important, and the economy can’t help that”
A lot of people view this as the Chinese century. What do you China will look like 200 years from now?
I think China has a lot of problems that have not been reported. The economic development has affected a lot of peoples’ value systems. It will become a huge social problem. As long as the CCP is around, the country’s value system will be bad. As long as the upper management is around, it will become a huge problem, including the unfair treatment and education of migrant workers. The generation before them had it worse, but their kids see how other people receive better treatment, and begin harboring resentment. This younger generation has a different experience from their parents’ generation and the generation before. And no one is doing anything. It is problematic that this segment of society, these migrant workers’ children, do not feel they have a legitimate place in society.
How do individuals become more creative?
I don’t think everyone needs to be creative. Creativity is a very niche thing. As long as everyone has access to a comfortable life, it’s enough. Not everyone needs to create something. The best society is one in which people have the choice to be creative, but not everyone needs to.
This is Part 4 of a six-part photo essay by Beijing-based student and artist Liu Qilin, who recently finished his freshman year of undergraduate study at Beijing Normal University. Liu, who goes by the English name Jady, is founder of the Beijing Hutong Team, a loose collective of artists and creatives united in a desire to document Beijing’s inner-city alleys (胡同, hutong), which are currently undergoing a process of “renovation” that many feel is stripping them of their historical and cultural charm.
Liu Qilin says about this photo:
The night I took this, my friends were planning out a short magazine they wanted to produce. After checking out some graffiti on Fangjia hutong, I went behind the live music venue Hot Cat Club, which had recently lost its street-facing entrance, and found its door sign discarded in a trash heap.
Follow Beijing Hutong Team on Facebook or WeChat (@BeijingHutongTeam)
Yin (音, “music”) is a weekly Radii feature that looks at Chinese songs spanning classical to folk to modern experimental, and everything in between. Drop us a line if you have a suggestion.
Birdstriking was one of the bands that sucked me into Beijing’s music scene early on. Back in 2010, when I’d just launched my label pangbianr, they were among my closest friends and favorite artists — their fresh, raw approach to deconstructed noise rock touched some nerves with me from the first time I saw them. Mixing a healthy disregard for pop-friendly song structures with an urgent yet earnest, palpably young protest mindset, Birdstriking wailed and flailed on stage in the golden days of long-gone venue D-22, staring down the barrel of their parents’ generation’s expectations of what their work/life balance should be, and where rock’n’roll might fit into it (nowhere, really). The band’s very name refers to a phenomenon in which a stray bird strikes down an airplane by flying into it — a metaphor aptly containing the band’s sonic tendencies toward rebellion and creative destruction.
Birdstriking released their self-titled debut in 2011, and coasted on that one for the next six years, stashing several international tours and festival appearances under their belt. Now they’re a bit older, a bit wiser, and have just (like, minutes ago) released their long anticipated second album, Holey Brain, several years in the making, day jobs be damned.
The album release is heralded by this thoroughly psychedelic animated music video for its debut single, “Feed”:
About this song’s imagery, Birdstriking says:
Baby birds grow up raised by mother birds, leave the nest, fly towards a bigger forest, look forward to taking care of their parents in their old age. They eat their mothers’ wrinkles, making their youth shine again… From a fairytale to an oath, the song unfurls like a scroll, telling the story of a generation coming to maturity like a bird just now hitting its stride in the blue, open sky, soaring without fear.
Mm. Metaphors. The song itself is a mellow, mature Birdstriking still clutching at the lessons they learned (and yelled with abandon) in their earlier years. A tuneful distillation of their various influences, and a comfortably uplifting way to kickstart the weekend for sure.
A limited number of Chinese words have made their way into the popular American lexicon. Feng shui, for example, as an ambiguous way to describe the “feel” of a room or articulate interior design plans. Yin and yang, largely absented of historical and philosophical context, gesture vaguely toward a balance between opposites.
I first encountered qi (气) through similar channels. To me, the word served primarily as a convenient way to get rid of a pesky “Q” tile in Scrabble. I knew it, vaguely, as a sort of life force, and related it mentally to the pressure points that I’d heard could dispatch an enemy with a single touch.
Like feng shui and yin yang, qi has traveled upstream against the flow of political power, relieved of semantic weight, its tone marks erased and phonetics mangled. In a sense, it has fallen victim to the limits of transcription and translation. In spite of the work of many scholars, qi has been boiled down in dictionaries to several constitutive elements — breath, energy, life force — in some ways restricting and in others freeing the development of popular understandings. To many English speakers, qi becomes a cipher: a set of sounds whose unfamiliar shapes recall a caricatured Orient, while their meanings have become simple, flexible, diffuse, and easily (mis)handled.
Qi is, in a sense, breath, and life force, and energy — but it’s also much more than these three simple phrases.
My foundational TCM theory textbook, 中医基础理论Zhongyi Jichu Lilun, describes another trajectory of translation. In an appendix to its section on qi, the textbook describes several contemporary research projects that attempt to make qi make sense for a Western scientific audience. These research programs adopt the language and theory of physics to approach qi as quantum fields or as entropy, or draw from the perspective of molecular biology to liken qi to ATP, the molecular form of energy. Qi (always partially, never without shedding some of itself) assumes the form of scientificity, in turn seeking to achieve a more stable, less penetrable aura of legitimacy.
The truth is that qi, more than a century after its 1850 English-language debut as k’i in The Chinese Repository, an early journal of Sinology, feels almost impossible to adequately translate into English. Scientific parallels falter, threatening to subsume qi into a world to which it does not entirely belong; the broad strokes of breath and life force, while not strictly incorrect, allow other meanings to insinuate themselves into spaces left behind by history forgotten, and philosophy disregarded.
Translation, as it turns out, is really hard.
The word qi, more than a century after its 1850 English-language debut, still feels almost impossible to adequately translate into English.
Last Saturday, I tagged along with a friend, a college student majoring in art history and researching queer art in China, to two of their interviews. I acted as an interpreter in both interviews, translating my friend’s questions from English to Chinese and the artist’s responses from Chinese to English. My friend’s questions were often theoretically complex, featuring meaty phrases like “the interplay of gazes” and “the trajectory of desire.” Many of the words my friend used landed with a certain weight — a web of associations with other words, ideas, histories — that I felt dissipate in my clumsy translations. Similarly, when the second artist we interviewed used language I recognized from the classical Chinese philosophy in my TCM theory textbook to discuss his representations of humans and nature, I struggled to find words in English to communicate the complexities contained within his simple, direct speech.
I discovered, in real time, that the task of translation doesn’t just require a large working vocabulary. It demands a broader theoretical awareness, complemented by a finely tuned sense of empathy.
At the beginning of the first interview, conducted with Beijing artist Shitou, my friend is eager to theorize her art with her. We begin with a painting from her early Weapons series, which depicts a nude female body rendered in black and white and laid in a bed of deep red cactus, a gun superimposed vertically over her torso. But Shitou seems hesitant to explain the why of her work. She speaks instead of painting as a form of healing, and of the emotions and experiences that inspired her to create this piece. Three hours of mediated conversation later, in what feels like a massive breakthrough, she offers us the word nong suo ti (浓缩体): a form or body created through condensation. She invites us to think of her art as the condensation of her ideas, emotions, and memories; the form of her work, which often involves collage and Surrealist juxtaposition, reflects this internal, meditative process. The word surprises and delights me. Immediately, my mind turns to qi.
At the most basic level, qi means air — formless, dynamic, and pervasive. My theory textbook explains that early classical Chinese thinkers observed the dual processes of evaporation and condensation — water turning to air, air turning to water — and formulated a philosophy of qi, of the formless colliding and condensing into form, creating the wanwu, the “ten thousand things,” Daoist shorthand for “everything.”
Shitou’s concept of condensation, then, is central to a classical Chinese philosophy of the birth and unfolding of the world: all things, as they come into being, are qi made manifest. Through a process far more complex and disjointed than the one I detail here, qi gained rich philosophical content, producing a world of knowledge and experience.
All things, as they come into being, are qi made manifest.
My professor at the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, besides practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine professionally, holds a deep historical interest in the emergence of qi lun, qi theory, during the Warring States Period. It was during this time, he tells us, that qi came to reside in the body in a way that is recognizable to a Zhongyi Jichu Lilun-educated foreigner like myself today.
As I learn from my textbook, qi is a formless substance that moves through channels throughout the body and performs a wide variety of functions: it rises and falls to propel digestion, for example, travels just beneath the surface of the body to fend off outside harm. The lungs take in fresh qi and circulate it throughout the body, and expel old, turbid qi; qi is also produced through digestion and from the jing, essence, stored within the body’s organs. Every organ has its own qi, which is constantly in action, working to maintain that organ’s functions in harmony with the others. Qi can stagnate, become depleted, or deviate from its normal course, causing illness; when this happens, TCM physicians must detect these changes, and figure out how to respond.
Qi is a formless substance that moves throughout the body and performs a wide variety of functions: it rises and falls to propel digestion, travels just beneath the surface of the body to fend off outside harm.
I understand qi as simultaneously philosophical and physiological, configuring the universe and propelling the workings of the body. It relies on the principles of harmony, the resolution or dynamic preservation of contradiction, forms of continuity underlying unending change. It is, in a sense, breath, and life force, and energy. But it’s also much more than those three simple phrases.
For me, qi has a set of intertwined meanings that I struggle to convey clearly and concisely. It’s why I’ve avoided writing about qi directly for so long: it provokes my anxieties about translation, about the preservation of philosophical depth, about my still-developing grasp of TCM’s theory and history.
Therefore, this piece is by no means authoritative or conclusive. It does not provide a straightforward, bite-sized definition of qi — nor, I think, does it support a false hope that there is one. It is, in itself, a sort of nong suo ti: a product of condensation, an amalgamation of dispersed thoughts, ideas, and experiences. I hope that it begins to open up new avenues to think about qi, a word that hangs suspended between Chinese and English, forever caught up in translation.
Illustration: Marjorie Wang
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