Monthly Archive for July, 2007

Uncertain Reality, Uncertain virtuality:Cao Fei

Published
by
Nan Yang
on July 31, 2007
in Film, Gender, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

China_tracy2

Here is the impressive Second Life documentary by China Tracy, an 29 year-old alternative female artist, from Guangzhou, China, who was also invited by iCommons to give a lecture on iSummit this year in June.
To watch the whole film, please check here.  You could also find this documentary on YouTube and many other websites. 

China_tracy

She runs a blog by the name of China Tracy’s Second Life Blog, while she writes a Real First Life blog named Cao Fei’s Blog. For more on her SL life, there’s an interview with her in English at New World Notes. Besides spending time living a Second Life in a virtual World, she pays attention to the Real world as well.

Here’s an interview (in Chinese) with her about some of her work, which was recently included in Yunnan New Film Series. In this interview, she discusses the fact that almost all of the directors taking part in this film series project are women, and most of them don’t have much experience in making films. Maybe it’s a signature of the revolution of new Chinese film and art period under the background of Creative Commons?

Tibetan inspired typography

Published
by
Jason Li
on July 29, 2007
in Art and Design
. 2 Comments

Danwei has an interesting post about examples of Tibetan influences in Chinese typography.

I’ve excerpted some images & commentary from Danwei below:

Tibetanfont1

The cover of an album by Han Hong, a singer born in Tibet whose songs
flavor generic Mando-pop with Tibetan influences. The 日 element in her
last name 韩 and the trainling stroke of the 红 are reminiscent of
Tibetan writing.

Tibetanfont2

This is Fan Wen’s 2004 best-seller Land of Water and Milk (水乳大地), which centers around French missionary efforts in eastern Tibet.

The Chinese characters in the title are Tibetan-ized - certain
elements have been replaced with Tibetan vowel indicators, and extra
Tibetan letters and markings are strewn about randomly. It’s surrounded
by the familiar mantra of Avalokiteshvara (both rightside-up and
upside-down).

Tibetanfont5

The best example of this practice is probably the movie poster for Lu Chuan’s 2004 western adventure, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol
(可可西里). To my eyes, the Chinese characters do a much better job of
evoking Tibetan writing than the examples given above, and the kicker
is that what at first looks like a series of vowel markings on top of
them turns out to be the the romanized title "Ke Ke Xi Li."

Link to full post on Danwei.

Progress Update on HipHi

Published
by
Jason Li
on July 24, 2007
in Blogs, Dating and Games
. 4 Comments

Suezanne Baskerville is tracking both Second Life and HipHi (China’s own Second Life-like game) on her blog.

The latest entries surround HipHi’s hype in Newsweek International that led to a public beta, and before that various resources (forums, screenshots, walkthrus) on how to get around in HipHi in English.

And of course, some experiential posts such as, "How do you delete a fire in HipHi?"

Sueinhiphi_2

Linked to from her posts, I found:

A great quote from a post on an English HipHi forum, written by the administrators, asking visitors to vote on HipHi policies:

"The genesis of HiPiHi world has gone through three development stages, ‘Sundering the Heavens and Splitting the Earth’, ‘Nu Wa creates Humankind’, ‘The Heavenly Duke Creates the Things’. During those phases, we witnessed great changes in this world, and now we are stepping into another brand new era where the economic transaction system and social systems will be introduced, that is the ‘Mirage’ and ‘the advent of the social organisms’."

Also linked from her blog, a great Newsweek International article photo:

Hiphipressfromnewsweek

With an interesting concluding paragraph:

"Netizens looking for raunchy sex will be disappointed—HiPiHi’s avatars can’t even strip nude. But Xu says there’s still a chance for romance; indeed, it’s already blossoming. One resident, ‘Wen Xi,’ the avatar of a woman from Hangzhou, apparently has several love interests—and she’s built a hip, bamboo-lined virtual bungalow for entertaining pals. She’s just the type of creative resident Xu and his investors hope will populate HiPiHi—but pioneers like her are scarce. Xu and Zhao have built a world. Now they can only wait to see if the Chinese will come."

Link to Sue’s blog: Unable to Connect — SuzeanneC Baskerville

How to spot a fake train ticket

Published
by
Jason Li
on July 23, 2007
in Meme and Travel
. 0 Comments

Found this on PostShow a while ago, finally got round to translating it.

Click image to enlarge.

Realornotticket

A glimpse at some architects in Beijing

Published
by
Jason Li
on July 15, 2007
in Art and Commerce
. 2 Comments

Atelier FCJZ was China’s first private architecture firm founded by Yung Ho Chang, who is or has been, amongst other things, the head of the architecture schools at BeiDa and MIT. Fourteen years later, it now consists of more than fifteen architects and takes on hosts of projects every year in China.

Atelier

http://www.fcjz.com

MAD is a Beijing-based architectural design studio headed by three up-and-coming architects, two Chinese, one Japanese, who have fancy foreign credentials (such as a Masters of Architecture from Yale). Their works veer towards the futuristic, and their website is filled with pretty renderings of buildings-to-be (some are under construction, some are merely conceptual).

Madltd

http://www.i-mad.com

on vacation in China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on July 11, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Hello all — Lyn here.  I’m on vacation in China and have been traveling for work a lot in the past couple weeks, thus my posts have been, well, nonexistent.  Hope to have more to share once I get back in late July.  Look forward to hearing from you or seeing you!  Also, for those who don’t know, all TypePad blogs are blocked in China now, so Virtual China is not available in the PRC.  We can post, but not read.  We’re working on setting up a mirror site.

QQ spotted at the Virtual Goods Summit 2007

Published
by
Jason Li
on July 2, 2007
in Commerce
. 0 Comments

Virtualgoodssummit

The Virtual Goods Summit 2007, that took place last month at Stanford, "is a one day conference focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies."

Amongst the speakers were representatives/top guys from mostly American companies like Six Apart, Habbo, and Linden Labs. And then there was a representative from China-based Tencent (creator of QQ).

Looks interesting, are there any summaries of the talks out there?

Via O’Reilly Radar.