Dive into the archives.
- La vida China: Canton Fear
This week Charlie and i have been spending time in and around the Canton Fair (also referred to by its much sexier title The China Import & Export Fair)
The Canton Fair is the biggest in the world. It happens twice a year. The current one is the 100th ever, and draws in people from literally ever imaginable part of the world. Being in Guangzhou, the heart of Chinese manufacturing, the fair is the main showcase for the incredible range of products currently being made in China. The things available for purchase range from gas masks to ice cream cone making machines to garden gnomes to erotic air fresheners to whatever you call that weird contraption that causes children’s shoes to light up on impact with the ground.
The think overwhelming is how I would describe it.
This is just one floor of one of the buildings…The scale and rigorousness of the hustling and haggling going on gives me a strange, ominous feeling like Moses was gonna suddenly appear from on high and punish us all for the greed and gluttony on display.
That hasn’t happened though, and so Charlie and I are going around interviewing the visitors, possibly for a special issue of UNIT. I’ll post up a sample interview in a couple days….
Popularity: 8% [?]
- Feedback: Shi Jian (史建)
I met today with Shi Jian (史建), writer and critic, and knowledgeable person all around. Of course, I showed him UNIT to hear his thoughts.
Basically he was positive. But he said it takes from 2 to 3 years to make a deep impression in China, so patience and stamina are critical.
But more important, he provided a lot of precious info on publishing a magazine in China. For anyone who’s thinking about doing a project like this, it’s good to keep this in mind:
The government stopped releasing new magazine publication licenses several years ago. There’s no hope in trying to get a new one for UNIT.
That leaves three possible strategies for releasing a new mag:
1. Find a small, struggling magazine and buy them out
You can then change the name, but continue to use their publication number. This is what most big publishers do when they want to start a new venture. He mentioned <<时尚>>/Trendsmag as one that uses this strategy.
The problems: First you have to find the magazine yourself - there’s no waiting list or anything like that. Second, there’s a money required to buy the mag out. Third, it is customary to pay an annual fee of about 100,000 RMB to the purchased company as a kind of maintenance.2. Register in Hong Kong
It’s free to register a magazine in Hong Kong. But you can’t sell it on the mainland. You can only offer subscriptions to “members” - then ship them to China. You can sell the mag at newsstands in Hong Kong. Apparently, this is the strategy that DOMUS-China is now using - offering subscriptions at discount rates to establish itself in mainland China.3. Register as a book
It’s easier to get a publishing license for a book. This is the strategy A+U uses in China. The main drawbacks are that you generally can’t sell books at newsstands and book distributors tend to focus on bookstores - and not alternative locations like cafes, clubs, etc. The other major difficulty is getting advertising. In order to include ads in a book, you need to get approval from the Bureau of Industry and Commerce (工商局). Shi Jian wasn’t completely sure how difficult the approval process is. One final drawback of the book number is that you can’t offer subscriptions.For more info, check out this post on Danwei, a great resource on media in China.
Popularity: 4% [?]
- Feedback: Wang Hui (王晖)
I met with the architect Wang Hui today to talk about UNIT. (Big up Wang Hui… He’s a nice and helpful guy.)
Overall, he was positive, but said it’ll be hard to find a large audience for it, and we should consider this in planning out exactly how/where we want to distribute it. This makes sense to me, but there seems a disturbing frequency with which people here try to convince me of the inability of ‘common’ Chinese people to understand/appreciate things. At a certain point I wonder if underestimation starts to become its own form of (self)censorship…
He also said “design” is a hot topic at the moment. Everyone is talking about it, but the understanding is very limited. Clients say things to him like, “You’re a designer: take something that costs 10 RMB and make it look like it costs 100 RMB.”
And, because of this combination of interest and ignorance, this is a good moment to introduce something that addresses design with intelligence and intention, so that China isn’t stuck with this limited notion of design.
He also mentioned he’s designing a car for Porsche, so that’s maybe a hot scoop or some kind.
Popularity: 10% [?]
- Back to life
So I realized that this blog is overrun by football posts, which is very strange since UNIT has absolutely nothing to do with football, and actually I’m not even that into football. But what can I say, the caught the spirit, and went a little over the top with it. But the is point what the hell is going on with UNIT.
I’ve been in Beijing for about two weeks now presenting the work we’ve done so far, hearing reactions, getting advice, and seeing if anyone up here can help us move forward.
Last week, media artist Yang Lei (杨磊) and I had a joint presentation at Salon, a venue for presenting and discussing new creative projects organized by my friend Andre Schmidt. Lei presented “b.tween 2 cultures” – a web-based visual dialog between China and the UK, done in collaboration with internationally renowned creative technologists Soda. (Check the site for a more detailed explanation of the concept and how it actually works.) He’d just come back from debuting the project at the b.TWEEN 06 interactive media festival in Bradford, UK, where it was shown on monitors around the site. He has plans for taking to a much grander scale though, and, like me, he was presenting a project in its very early stages.
I gave a short presentation of the just released UNIT 01 then showed UNIT 02, the first full-fledged issue we’ve made since coming to China. The story of UNIT 02 is a sad little parable on “strategic misunderstanding” - a powerful tool against which anyone attempting to do business in a place without speaking its language is vulnerable.
Popularity: 3% [?]
