The author behind ‘The First Paradise of Fang Siqi,’ a novel that Han described as ‘a young girl falling in love with her rapist,’ has sent shockwaves through Taiwanese society.
On April 27, aspiring Taiwanese author Lin Yi Han committed suicide, leaving behind only her first, and sadly last, novel. The story, entitled “The First Love Paradise of Fang Siqi,” concerns the mental struggles of a young girl who is raped by her teacher.
Beijing-based artist Liu Yi is working on a series of black-and-white portraits he knows will never be shown in a Chinese gallery. His varied subjects — men and women, young and old, smiling and pensive — have one thing in common: They are Tibetans who have set themselves on fire to protest repressive Chinese rule.
If there’s one thing we know for certain about China in 2019, it’s that people there love their apps. They use WeChat to talk with friends; they spend hours battling virtual enemies on PUBG; they binge-watch short videos on Douyin. And so why shouldn’t the Communist Party get in on the action?
The son of an exiled political dissident, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s work is inherently political. Since 1995 Ai Weiwei has been traveling the world, photographing himself flipping off iconic monuments of power in his Study of Perspective series.
Brother Gao are two China artists. Their works are aims at reflecting the reality of Chinese society in an artistic and critical view. In 2003, the brothers held an event to invite many strangers for a dinner.
Late last month, Chinese citizens took up a creative means of protest over the nation’s strict “zero-COVID” policy. In a place with little tolerance for large public demonstrations, protesters have been holding up blank pieces of paper. Their ingenuity inspired a local artist Yolanda He Yang to stage a public art demonstration to subtly communicate their dissent.
China's "Punchline Queen" Yang Li is no stranger to controversy.
The 29-year-old is now one of the country's most well-known comedians, having risen to fame in recent months on a Chinese television show called "Rock and Roast".
Every week, in front of a national audience of millions, she addresses controversial gender issues using a style unfamiliar to many Chinese viewers - stand-up comedy.
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) by Ai Weiwei is a highly provocative work of art. This series of three black and white photographs portray the artist holding a 2,000-year-old Han dynasty urn that, frame by frame, he drops, it falls, and shatters. As much a work of photography as a work of performance art, in each still an unaffected Ai looks directly at the camera aware of his destructiveness.
They are disparaged as “free-willed” women, “stubborn,” “picky,” “incomplete.”
But a video by an East Asian beauty brand that went viral over the past week has upended the conversation on China’s sheng nu, which translates literally into “leftover women” — those who happen to be over 27 and unmarried.
“People think that in Chinese society an unmarried woman is incomplete. You feel like an outsider,” says one young woman.
Protests erupted in cities and on campuses across China this weekend as frustrated and outraged citizens took to the streets in a stunning wave of demonstrations against the government’s “zero covid” policy and the leaders enforcing it.
The “Occupy Men’s Toilets” movement, initiated by Chinese feminist activists including Li Tingting (Li Maizi) and Wu Rongrong, emerged in 2012 as a creative, non-violent protest against gender inequality in access to public facilities.
Photographer Sim Chi Yin spent more than three years documenting a Chinese gold miner who is suffering from the deadly lung disease silicosis. Despite the odds, his loving relationship with his wife has kept him alive much longer than anyone expected.
One of the most critical artists on the contemporary art scene is Zhang Huan. His works are of great social insight and unique in how he applies his artistic expression. He thus makes them an almost visual feast with a peek into the multilevel structure of modern society. One such work is the masterpiece "Family Tree," which shows how art can mould our social cognition through multilayered symbolism and profound imagery.
The New Culture Movement was initiated by Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Cai Yuanpei, Qian Xuan and other writers who had received Western education (called the new-style education at the time). It is an ideological and cultural innovation and literary revolutionary movement.
Women in China are covertly resisting government crackdowns on discussions over their Me Too movement with a clever workaround.
The phrase “rice bunny” (米兔), pronounced as “mi tu,” has popped up on social media networks after censors removed posts that mentioned sexual harassment or the hashtag #MeToo. While those phrases are heavily monitored, Rice Bunny isn’t.
Song Dong's Waste Not consisted of a single installation comprising over 10,000 commonplace, domestic items of daily life that had been used and amassed by the artist’s mother (Zhao Xiangyuan) over fifty years.
"100 Questions About Sex from Children" is an annual touring sex education exhibition founded and curated by Se A, a leading advocate of inclusive sex education in China. Since its launch in 2021, the exhibition has been held in major cities such as Shenzhen and Guiyang, with plans to expand into regions where sex education and gender awareness remain underdeveloped.
Students at art colleges across China are taking a strong stance in the midst of the largest wave of protests to have gripped the country since 1989. As demonstrations against the government’s strict Covid-19 policies erupted across the country over the weekend, students rallied on campuses to create protest art and graffiti.
“Girl’s Day” in China was supposed to be a way for boys on college campuses to show the girls how much they care. This year it went too far.
Have you heard about “Girl’s Day?” It’s a big holiday for Chinese college students. Every year on March 7, students throughout the country celebrate the day as a campus version of International Women’s Day.
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Five Chinese feminists have been arrested for planning to protest against sexual harassment. They face five to ten years in jail. This post explains the background to the case, and suggests ways that other activists around the world can show solidarity.
Just the other day, we were hearing about Samsung getting in legal trouble over patent violations with Apple. A federal court decision ruled that Samsung owes Apple more than $1 billion in restitution.
Zuoxiao Zuzhou is a Chinese singer whose accented, croaky voice is hardly ever in tune. But for his fans he's the voice of a generation — one of the very few voices who dare to speak out. After a collaboration, Cowboy Junkies member Michael Timmins called him "China's Leonard Cohen."
Yu Hong’s Female Writer, a painted and photographic portrait of the writer Zhao Bo 趙波 (b. 1971), recalls courtly images of idealized beauties. Yu, however, deliberately complicates the perspective in her composition: she asked the sitters for her She series to select photographs of themselves that could be paired with her paintings, meaning that the images together convey dual female perspectives, both the artist’s and the subject’s.