Jacapo Baboni-Schilingi  is a self-taught is a composer who has mixed different mediums in order to create new musical perspectives and erase artistic borders. Of the belief that music is a fundamental, even primordial aspect of life, much of his work has focused on the spontaneity of improvised composition. In addition to his multitude of projects that span from performative composition on human bodies to user-generated musical systems embedded in artist built installations and sculptures, Baboni-Schilingi has also taught composition at the École Nationale de Musique du Pays de Montbéliard since 1999 and regularly gives courses in musicology at the Université Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV. He has lectured in Argentina, Belgium, Chile, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, and Portugal as well as has written more than 20 articles for publications in France and Italy, including contributions to PRISMA-01.

Sebastian Alonso Bessonart 塞巴斯蒂安·阿隆索 is a Uruguayan artist living and working in Montevideo, where he teaches at the National Academy of Fine Arts. Alonso has been working for twenty years on hybrid artistic and curatorial projects, including the development of Casa Mario, a mixed-use space dedicated to artist residencies, exhibitions, salon conversations, performances and publishing. Since 2004, Alonso has been a member of the collective, Alonso + Craciun, which was included in the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale, the 1st Biennale of Montevideo and most recently, the 15th Havana Biennale. He is a member of The Collective Eye. Sebastian was in dialogue with Heinz Norbert Jocks and Dominique Garaudel for the May 2014 AM Brainstorm.

John Brady is a student and teacher of Philosophy and Literature. Hailing from Australia, he has a penchant for beer and an admiration for a Beijing sun that doesn't cause melanoma. In his spare time he teaches computers to make a paradoxical dance music that can't be danced to. Beijing's environmental dystopic vistas enthrall him, and he wonders about the moral status of breathing any other kind of air. Living in and watching "Communism with Chinese Characteristics" is slowly turning him into a Leninist, also a chain a smoker. He is generally happy. Brady performed at the opening of The Bibliorium together with Jordan Thomas Mitchell as well as was in conversation with Mitchell for the October 2014 AM Brainstorm. Medium

BU Yun Jun 卜云军 is a photographer who graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. His photographic practice looks abstracts the forms of the ready made and the found object. Having explored the minutiae of escalators, ceiling fans and paint chipped walls, Bu’s work looks to reveal a deeper relation with the object when printed, framed and hung at life-size proportions. He is fascinated with the textual quality of objects, such as the slight sheen and contour felt when photographing black trash bags or a dark puddle just after the rain. Bu installed three photographic works in the “Perceptions of Home” experience.

CHEN Xi 陈熹 was born in Wuhan (1985), graduated from Jiangnan University with his BA in 2008 and from ECNU with this MFA in 2012. He currently works and lives in Beijing. For the past 10 years, Chen Xi’s work deployed a large number of imagery techniques, including five genres of painting and drawing, and more than twenty forms of animations and visual essays. His paintings capture digital landscapes, haunting spaceships, mutating portraits, exotic abstractions with lots of information, and sometimes use only one layer of acrylic paint. To Chen, each genre generates his next mode of working, often relying on the exploration of personal experience, and the creation of fictional histories for the immediate present. Chen Xi was in conversation with Shen Zejian during the August 2014 edition of A.M Brainstorm, developed an interactive installation for “Perceptions of Home” and contributed a series of poems entitled “Room Raiders” to the first issue of Bajia. 

Chen Xinghui 陈兴慧 is doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo, School of Management, Xinghui studies how behaviorial science is used to help non-profit organizations build capabilities. She received bachelor degree in Marketing from the Harbin Institute of Technology and two Masters degrees in Software Engineering and Social Enterprise Management from Peking University’s School of Software & Microelectronics and the Guanghua School of Management respectively. Xinghui has worked as an volunteer for the Father Ray Foundation, as well as was formerly employed at Chinablue, an NGO focused on sustainable fishing in China. Xinghui devotes herself to fighting for a world in which people admire wisdom instead of money and power. Xinghui worked together with Dr. Xu Jing to contribute to 八家 Bajia House 2. Together they researched and wrote a case study on the Digua Community, a social enterprise for basement dwellers in Beijing.

CHEN Zhiyuan 陈志远 opened Wuyou Studio in 2012, after completing an apprenticeship in a traditional woodworking studio where he studied the techniques of Chinese furniture building. In his workshop, he seeks to explore the relationship between craft and creativity and aims to develop a process of material investigation that leads to a logic of use as perfected through practice. Chen designed and built the “Book Grove” for the Bactagon experience, “The Bibliorium.” 

Jenny Chou is a multidisciplinary Beijing-based designer from Taipei, and is a founding partner and principal of Studio ATLAS. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 with a minor in Contemporary Theory and Criticism, and her Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University GSAPP in 2008. She has also served as visiting critic at City College of New York, Konkuk University in Seoul, and University of Hong Kong and China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou. In recent years, she has worked with Taiwanese architect Hsieh Ying Chun, Chinese curator and activist Ou Ning as the assistant curator of the 2011 Chengdu Biennale and with Taiwanese curator, Esther Lu, as the designer of the Taiwan Pavillon at the 55th Venice Biennale. In 2014, she founded Studio Atlas, which takes a process-based approach to design that aims to capture the both marks of time and technique as well as the experimental potentials of materials. Each project the studio takes on is an opportunity to articulate a contemporary narrative that bridges between cultures and contexts. Jenny was in conversation with WAI Architecture Think Tank for the July 2014 A.M. Brainstorm and contributed the text “In Search of Center” for the first issue of 八家 Bajia.

Samantha Culp is a California-born writer, curator and creative producer based between Los Angeles and Shanghai. She has spent the past decade in greater China, first in Hong Kong, then in Beijing and Shanghai. Her writing and criticism have appeared in publications such as Artforum, the New York Times T Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and as a contributing editor of Chinese art magazine LEAP (艺术节). Samantha is the founder and director of New Territories, an experimental studio for research and production, which develops projects and events spanning art, cinema, and design. She recently co-founded Paloma Powers, a creative agency developing artist-led solutions for realms far beyond the art world. Bactagon partnered with Samantha and her studio, New Territories, to produce the China Indie Library for the Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair 2015.

Display Distribute 展销场 is a thematic inquiry, distribution service, now and again exhibition space and sometimes shop based out of Kowloon, Hong Kong. Documenting the ad-hoc arrangements and various micro and macro interactions that are rapidly transforming the social and material landscape, Display Distribute undertakes collaborative research projects that trace these flows and fissures in order to investigate new possibilities for networked forms of production. Recently, these activities have included artist-run distribution service LIGHT LOGISTICS, poetic research and archival unit The Shanzhai Lyric, the catalogue-cum-readers’ digest publication『CATALOGUE』 and a peripatetic radio program of hidden feminist narratives known as Widow Radio Ching. Together with Display Distribute members, Elaine W. Ho 何颖雅 and Liu Ying 刘颖 aka DongDong 东东, 八家 Bajia organized the one-day workshop, Distribution Assembly East at the Institute for Provocation in Beijing. 

Jacob Dreyer is a Beijing-based writer and theorist of architecture. He is Senior Editor at Lifestyle 品味生活 Magazine and his work has been published in a wide variety of journals in the US, UK and China. His book The Nocturnal Wanderer is due to be published by Eros Press. Jacob participated in “The Bibliorium” as a guest curator of the curated bookshelves and also read from his book “The Nocturnal Wanderer” during The Bibliorium symposium.

Yuan Fuca 富源 is a Chinese writer and curator based in Beijing.Her writing, interviews and exhibition reviews appear in ARTnews, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, LEAP, Art Asia Pacific, BOMB, Yishu, New York Times T Magazine, among others. She had curated exhibition programs for institutions and galleries in China and North America. Yuan co-founded Salt Projects, a research-based curatorial studio in Beijing. She is also the publisher and founding editor of magazine Commonplace. In this role, she participated in the Distribution Assembly East.

Dominique Lucien Garaudel is a communication designer whose projects look to transform society; he is perpetually questioning how far one can go with creativity and what the role between communication and art. Dominique has created and managed a plethora of cultural projects, exhibitions and symposiums in Uruguay, Morocco and China. As a creative, his works ranges from directing videos, to creating campaigns, making installations, teaching and giving workshops. He founded the Moxie Collective in 2009, which works mostly with cultural institutions. Since 2012 he’s managed The Collective Eye, a project about the collective practice in the art world. At the end of 2014 he created the Wall of Sand project at the Art and Human Rights Festival Artifariti in Western Sahara's refugee camps in the Algerian desert. Since 2015 he has co-run denken3000 Studio. Dominique was in dialogue with Heinz Norbert Jocks and Sebastian Bessonart for the May 2014 AM Brainstorm. 

HU Xiangqian 胡向前 (b. 1983) was born in Leizhou, Guangdong Province and graduated in 2007 from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in Beijing. Hu’s artistic practice is grounded in performance and video works documented with an intentional amateurishness and crudeness. His inspirations and motivations arise from his immediate surroundings, his intuition, and his artistic contemplation of what it means to be an artist. His work highlights the contrasts in our society and amplifies minor incidents into major social signifiers. In his words, he does not consider what he does to be the maker of performance art; rather he focuses on the act of performance itself. He bluntly though genuinely pursues possibilities of experiencing an intangible reality. Through their absurd characteristic, his works often use humor — whether in Sun (2008) where, over the course of months, he attempt to tan his skin the same shade as his African friends in Guangzhou, or Two Men (2008), where he dons the costume of the green pedestrian traffic light man, and dances with a man in red. 

Hu’s performance Speech at the End of the World (2013) was included in the “Teetering at the Edge of the World” exhibition in Uruguay. In his work, Hu delivers a motivational speech to 2,000 high school students from his alma mater.  The oration follows the protocol of a motivational speech: it is brief, punctuated by pauses and emphatic hand gestures, and has a clear narrative arc. Like a storyteller, he recounts his youth in Leizhou, and conveys the wisdoms he’s gained from personal experience to those who can benefit. Also like a storyteller, who must translate his knowledge and wisdom into a form digestible by the listener, Hu delivers the speech in the Leizhou dialect, despite all classes being conducted in standardized Mandarin, and makes use of contemporary references, like Google Earth, in order to create genuine interest and intrigue amongst his audience. 

HUANG Jingyuan 黄静远: From Guangxi and of Zhuang minority descent, Jingyuan received a BFA from Concordia University (Montreal)  and a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago . Since returning to China in 2010, her work has focused on the contradictions and disconnections within Chinese society, and between China and the world. Two major series were produced during this period: the "Confucius City Project" and "I Am Your Agency." Since 2014, Huang has worked with the idea of socialist realism, attempting to subvert the key mechanics of this historically complex genre. Notable projects from this period of work include "Civility Trilogy," "Invitation of Models," and "Mao's Love Letter." In 2017, her exhibitions and residencies have focused on exploring the conflicted inner strength of people in the provincial setting. She is actively engaged in building new (organizational) agencies that allow art to become more involved in everyday social life. She is the director of film "Solutions" (2018), a contributor to ARTFORUM (China), LEAP and Flash Art, a participant of "Theater 44" and "OnPractice," as well as initiator of “Writing Mothers,” an on-going collaborative writing project with the ambition of discovering the potential of a feminist critique offered through the lens of family life. Jingyuan served as guest editor of 八家 Bajia House 2. 

HUANG Zhenwei 黄振伟 attended the Advanced Writer’s Workshop at Lu Xun’s Academy of Literature in 1997. Since then, he has worked in the publishing industry in Beijing. During his free time, he writes novels and makes documentaries. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Chutzpah! - a literary magazine. 

Heinz-Norbert Jocks is a German author, art critic and curator, currently based in Düsseldorf and working in Paris and Beijing. In addition to being a regular contributor and editor for the magazine Kunstforum International since 1979, Jocks has recorded thousands of interview hours between artists such as Georg Baselitz, Bill Viola, Mike Kelley, and Cindy Sherman, curators such as Massimilliano Gioni, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Harald Szeemann, as well as philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and François Jullien. Additionally, he has written extensively on contemporary art in China, including the works of Qiu Zhijie, Liu Xiaodong, Yu Hong, Cai Guo-Qiang, Huang Yong Ping, and Li Gang amongst others. Furthermore, he is the author and editor of two Kunstforum issues about “Art in Beijing.” Jocks has taught at several art academies in Germany and has lead workshops for art writers and journalists during the ninth Shanghai Biennale. In 2011, Jocks along with Dominique Lucien Garaudel created The Collective Eye. He is currently writing about the relationship between life and art. Norbert was in dialogue with Dominique Garaudel and Sebastian Bessonart during the May 2014 A.M. Brainstorm. 

Elaine W. Ho 何颖雅 works between the realms of time‐based art, language, urban practice and design, using multiple vocabularies to explore the micropolitics, subjectivities and alter-possibilities of an intimate, networked production. The act of describing takes on a number of forms—a kind of grammar, a documentation, a gesture, a biography—or an experiment in Beijing known as HomeShop. She is the initiator of the artist-run space, active from 2008-2013, and continues to ask questions about the sociopolitics of syntax, more recently via print                            (• • PROPAGANDA DEPARTMENT), pirate broadcast (Widow Radio Ching & #RADIOHED) and as co-conspirator with Display Distribute, a networked research platform investigating bottom-up organisation amidst global trade (2015-ongoing). She likes to drink coffee and tea mixed together and is a frequent contributor at www.iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter.net.

Joe jo 丹坤 is a Chinese artist and storyteller that works and lives in Beijing. He works with photography, film and installation art. He is currently working on a story for his next exhibition, in which he is searching for a connection between reality, fantasy and memory. The protagonist, straight from northern Hubei provence, where a wild childhood was had, commences his story with a meditation in the mountains of Bear Creek, California. In his meditative trance, he seeks a trigger to connect these disparate parts of our conscious while simultaneously exploring the senses that comprise human existence. Born in Hubei province, Joe jo taught himself English and photography when he moved to Beijing in 2005. 

LI Mei 李梅 graduated with a BA from Nanjing University of the Arts and a MA from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Upon completion, she returned to China in 2011 to work as the visual editor of LEAP Magazine. While she predominately works at the intersection of photography and design content, she also works as a jewelry designer.

LIN Zhipeng 林志鹏 (aka 223) is a photographer, writer and zine maker who captures the emotional roller coaster of life as a youth in China. Focused on both his own and friends’ personal experiences, Lin Zhipeng 223 uses the snapshot to depict the rawness of young adult life in China today. Amidst the pressures of a burgeoning middle class, Lin Zhipeng 223 looks at how contemporary social forces challenge notions of identity, namely gender and sexuality. 223 is Lin Zhipeng’s online and social media name, for which he is more widely known – the continued use of this name validates the power of internet and social media culture in China today. From Guangdong province, his blog North Latitude 23, that holds many of his personal photographs and texts, has had millions of views. He has contributed to numerous creative and fashion magazines as an editor and writer, and further has produced photo shoots for magazines such as Vice, S magazine, VISION, iLOOK, and City Pictorial, as well as worked with brands such as United Nude, Converse, Nike, Glaceau Vitamin Water, and Bacardi. In 2005 he started his self-publish projects, which has led to the three volume work entitled “My Private Broadway,” the two zines zines entitled “VERSATILE,” and the independent creative magazine, TOO. In 2012 he published a book of his photographic works entitled “NO.223 in Taiwan,” and a personal travel book entitled “SATELLITE OF LOVE.” Lin’s “Versatile II” was included in the exhibition “Teetering at the Edge of the World.”

LEI Lei 雷磊 is a multi-media artist living and working in Beijing, China. His artistic practice involves stop-motion animation, graphic design, illustration, short cartoons, graffiti and music. He received his MA in animation from Tsinghua University and has had his films shown and awarded at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, Annecy Festival, Holland International Animation Film Festival and was the winner of the 2014 Asian Cultural Council Grant. His stop motion film Recycled (2013) was screened at “The Bibliorium” as part of the “Material Flux” video installation. The images found in Recycled come from negatives salvaged from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, where they had been sent for filtration of their silver nitrate content. French collector, Thomas Sauvin, built this “Silvermine” archive of more than half a million 35mm negatives, which depict the lives of contemporary China over the past twenty years. From 2011 to 2013, Chinese artist Leilei selected over 3,000 photos from this collection to create this film. By animating these photographs with an intensity of pace—and juxtaposed with a soundtrack of white noise, electric hums, helicopters and traffic sounds—he was able to breathe life back into the stillness of each individual frame, composing a larger portrait of the anonymousness of humanity. 

Max Levy left his hometown of New Orleans at the age of 17, Max has spent the last two decades living and working in Alaska, Japan, Colorado, New York, Shanghai and Beijing. Across these various locale, he has learned the skills of his culinary trade, particularly in Japan, a place whose food culture and traditions remind him of his home in Louisiana. He is the owner and head chef of Okra in Beijing and Hong Kong. Max was in dialogue with Aitor Olabegoya during the April 2014 A.M. Brainstorm. 

LI Xiaodong 李晓东 is an architect whose work retains a strong discourse within classical Chinese thought, bridging modernity with a perception for sensing space from ‘within’ and the natural world in which it is rooted. On the outskirts of Beijing, nestled at the foot of the Great Wall, sits one of his notable projects — the Liyuan Library. Using firewood to cover the facade, the building effortlessly expresses the essence of a practice that lies a the intersection of artistic ingenuity, spiritual resoluteness and technical precision. Li explores these themes in his book, “Chinese Conception of Space” (1991). Having graduated from the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University, where he now serves as a professor, Li went on to received his PhD in architecture from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. His designs for the Yuhu Elemnetary School in Lijiang, China won the UNESCO Jury Award for Innovation (2004) as well as the Bridge School in Fujian, China which won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2010). He was interviewed in the piece “Constructing Spatial Experiences: The Influences of Chinese Thought on Architecture” published in the first issue of Bajia. 

LIU Chengrui 刘成瑞 (aka Guazi 瓜子) practice incorporates live performances, durational performances, video, and writing. His live performances’(or on-site performances) highlight the intense degree of repetition of certain behaviors in a particular setting. His durational performances often explore the relationships among people established for art-related purposes, regardless of any potential cultural inequalities. Maintaining this relationship with people, the artist manages to influence their life paths and social characters. Most of the artist’s durational performances last for a lifetime. The artist’s video work often employs pasture landscape as backgrounds to invoke the absurdity and poetic qualities of human beings situated in such a surrealistic atmosphere. Liu lives and works in Beijing but is from Qinghai province, where he received his BFA. Liu reflected on his performative practice and the ways he forms relationships as a component of his practice in his interview with Huang Jingyuan for 八家 Bajia House 2. 

LIU Chuang 刘窗 is an interventionist, acting in the public sphere as he challenges public perceptions of both daily life and conventional patterns. Exploring social rules, he plays with them as a way to disrupt the conventional status of things with simple, yet poetic ideas that resonate politically and philosophically. His artistic approach takes as its starting point the rupture between individuals and their inner aesthetics, exploring art in new social territories. After developing his practice in Shenzhen, Liu Chuang currently lives and works in Beijing. For “The Bibliorium” symposium, Liu read selected texts from his project Love Story, in which he collected thousands of secondhand pulp romance novels from bookstores in factory cities around Dongguang, Guangdong. Hilighting notes scribbled in the margins of the books, he discovered surprising messages, secret codes and personal memories between friends and lovers.  

LIU Xiaodong 刘小东 is a painter of modern life, whose large-scale works serve as a kind of history painting for the emerging world. Liu locates the human dimension within global issues such as population displacement, environmental degradation and economic upheaval. Through carefully orchestrated compositions, he walks the line between artifice and reality. A leading figure among the Chinese Neo-Realist painters to emerge in the 1990s, his adherence to figurative painting amounts to a conceptual stance within a contemporary art context where photographic media dominate. His undertaking ‘to see people as they really are’ was galvanized in the aftermath of 1989 events and, alert to the legacy of Chinese Socialist Realism, his compositions are painted with loose, casual brushstrokes and layered with meaning. While he works from life and often en plein air, he chooses sitters to supply ancillary narratives to landscapes or situations. This participatory dimension to his practice, where projects are also documented by diaries and films, reflects an urgent sense of interconnection: ‘Society and art’, he says, ‘should be like breathing – one breathes in and the other breathes out’ (2008). Liu Xiaodong lives and works in Beijing but has undertaken projects in Tibet, Japan, Italy, the UK, Cuba and Austria, and in his hometown of Jincheng, located in the north-eastern province of Liaoning, China, where he was born in 1963. A selection of entries from his Hometown Boy (2013) project diary were translated from their original Chinese to be included in the “Teetering at the Edge of the World” exhibition. His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including Qatar Museums Gallery, Doha (2016), Gwangju Biennale (2014), Shanghai Biennale (2000, 2010), the 15th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2006) and the Venice Biennale, Italy (2013, 1997). He is currently a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing. Excerpts from his diary for the “Hometown Boy” project were included in the “Teetering at the Edge of the World” exhibition. 

Catherine McMahon 馬紅 is a designer, researcher, and historian based in Beijing and a partner at Studio ATLAS. Her work focuses on the intersection of technology and nature, histories of digital representation, and more recently the role of craft production in contemporary society. She studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also a co-founder of the design studio, Atlas. Catherine participated in the September A.M. Brainstorm and discussed the process of collecting as art with photography collector, Thomas Sauvin. 

Jordan Thomas Mitchell is a musician by birthright and an artist by toil. Relocating to Beijing at the age of 19, Mitchell developed an instigative performance art practice targeting phenomena observed in a society he had few tools by which to chisel an understanding. From street performance pieces that flagrantly intrude the camera into uninvited social situations (The Sleeper, 2010), to identity-defying musical performances upending Mitchell’s background as a folk-musician and re-situating his person as a series of permutations on a made-up character called Chronmaster (Chronmaster, 2012 / Dirge King, 2013 / Earth Eater, 2014 / Donna Chron, 2017), the work Mitchell produces is urgent, inspired and emotional. Jordan participated in an A.M. Brainstorm together with John Brady, following the pair's improvised musical performance at "The Bibliorium" opening night. His film Native Vision was included in the Montevideo exhibition "Teetering at the Edge of the World" and was performed as live theater during Fictionalized Realities. 

MENG Qi 孟奇 is electronic music artist, synth maker, programmer and professor, who has given instrument building workshops and lectures at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Beijing Contemporary Music Institute, Beijing’s Maker Space, Zajia Lab, Shanghai’s XinCheJian, and Maker Carnivals, amongst other institutions. Asa pioneer of Chinese contemporary digital art, he is renowned for his distinctive devices, instruments and the music they produce, resulting in their use by electronic music artists world wide. Meng Qi participated in the June 2014 A.M. Brainstorm and performed live during “The Bibliorium” and “Perceptions of Home.” He further contributed a piece “Multi-layer Sampling” to the first issue of Bajia.

Matthew Neiderhauser, depending on the day, is either an artist, photojournalist, or cinematographer. He studied anthropology and economics at Columbia University before moving to Beijing in 2007 to focus on longterm documentary ventures depicting urban development, creative communities, and the rise of consumer culture across China. During this time his work appeared in publications such as Wired, The New Yorker, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, and Foreign Policy. While in China he also began production on his first feature documentary “Kapital Creation: Chasing the Chinese Dream” along with other new media projects that brought him back to New York in 2014. Matthew then earned his MFA in Art Practice from SVA and is currently a visiting scholar at the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism, visiting artist at the MIT Center for Arts, Science, and Technology, and member of New Inc, where he cofounded Sensorium Works. Photographs from Niederhauser’s “Kapital Creation” series were included in the “Teetering at the Edge of the World” exhibition.

Ni Kun 倪昆 is a curator and art writer who currently lives in Chongqing. He is the co-founder of Organhaus, an independent art space and artist residency program. Ni Kun is and his work is continuously focused on artistic interaction between China's rapid urbanization background and the factual context of globalization. The public art projects and international forums that he has curated, such as “City and Reengineering” and “Migration and Nomadism” reflect his thinking towards the current situation.

Luis NUO 路易斯诺 is a (fake) screenwriter, (fake) poet and (fake) artist. He is the author of the nine-hour film "In Course of the Miraculous” (2015) directed by Cheng Ran. He is currently meditating on whether it is fiction that creates reality or reality that creates fiction. Luis contributed the screenplay, "A Day in the Life of Jane" to the first issue of Bajia. 

Aitor Olabegoya was the first prize winner at The International Competition for Young Chefs in Spain in 1999. He is also the most award winning Spanish chef in Beijing. He is currently the head chef of the two Migas restaurants in Beijing, though splits his time between Hong Kong, Spain and Beijing. He is constantly in search of new recipes and cooking techniques that enable him to fuse different products from different cultures, and pair them with his special Mediterranean touch. Olabegoya was in conversation with Max Levy in the first A.M. Brainstorm (April 2014). 

Robin Peckham 岳鸿飞 is a curator and critic living in Beijing and Hong Kong. He is currently the deputy chief editor of LEAP magazine and chief editor of The Art Newspaper (Hong Kong). He founded and directed the independent exhibition space Saamlung (Hong Kong) until 2013. Since then, he has organized exhibitions for institutions including the City University of Hong Kong, the Goethe Institut, and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. His writing is published regularly in ArtForum, Yishu, and Broadsheet, as well as in catalogs for the Minsheng Art Museum, Para/Site Art Space, and Timezone8. Peckham was a guest curator for “The Bibliorium” symposium.

Pet Conspiracy 宠物同谋 was founded in 2007, and since then has become a household name amongst the Chinese youth population – ironic, given the band’s underground start and indie musical elements. A hit from the start, the band’s somewhat coincidental formation starts from a commercial Tiger Beer campaign. Although the band members have changed and the direction has shifted since its founding, Huzi (producer), along with Edo (percussions), Yun Yun (vocals) and Mary (vocals) remain a dynamic quartet with strong musical talents, animal fetishes and a love-hate relationship that epitomizes all creative output. Having toured throughout Asia and Europe, the electro band’s performances reach beyond the auditory sense. Incorporating carefully planned stage and lighting designs, the band is always dressed to impress – masked animals or space-aged costumes are not rare.  Eccentric in every angle, Pet Conspiracy’s performances are wildly intoxicating with vivid beats that energize the body and mind. Bactagon Projects collaborated with Pet Conspiracy to develop the “Shadow Beats” (2013) photography exhibition and live music and areal dance performance at Yugong Yishan.

Michelle Proksell 媚潇 is a Saudi born American artist based in China, working with video, storytelling, performance, music, photography and the World Wide Web.  Alongside writing and producing visual mediums, she is an active freelance photographer in Beijing.  She is currently collaborating with bāc-tā-gon to document projects via photography, video footage, audio, as well as produces the A.M. Brainstorm podcast.

Qiu Anxiong 邱黯雄 is an artist, animator and currently a professor in he Design School at the East China Normal University. His most notable animations include “New Book of Mountain and Sea,” “Republican Era Landscape,” and the video installation “For the Forgotten Memory.” In 2007 he founded the Museum of Unknown, a platform for dialogue and collaboration across different disciplines, including the arts, sociology, science, architecture. His works have participated in the Sao Paulo Biennale, the Shanghai Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial (Now the Asia Biennale), the Sydney Biennale and the Asia-Pacific Triennial. Qiu Anxiong’s works “New Book of Mountain and Sea I and II” as well as “Temptation of the Land” and “Integrated Circuits” were included in the exhibition “Teetering at the Edge of the World.” 

Alessandro Rolandi 利山 studied chemistry, experimental theatre and film-making and art history. Since 2003, he has been living and working in Beijing as a multimedia and performance artist, director, curator, researcher, writer and lecturer. His work focuses on social intervention and relational dynamics to expand the notion of art practice beyond existing structures, spaces and hierarchies and engage directly with reality in multiple ways. In 2011, he founded the Social Sensibility Research & Development Department at Bernard Controls in Beijing and in 2014 founded the Paris branch. He is also one of the founding partners of the Social Sensibility Research Institute (SoSense). Rolandi created a unique installation of the stories and narratives created throughout SSR+D for the “Teetering at the Edge of the World” exhibition. He also served as the guest editor of and contributor to 八家 Bajia House 2: Social Spaces.

Thomas Sauvin 苏文 is a French photography collector, editor and curator who lives in Paris. Since 2006, the photography collector has amassed and archived more than half a million negatives destined for destruction. The Beijing Silvermine offers a unique photographic portrait of China and the lives of its populace over a period of 20 years – from 1985, when Kodak film first became available in China, to 2005, when digital photography became the most prevalent popular technology. The name Silvermine is derived from Sauvin’s process of collecting these negatives; for eight years, Sauvin traveled to a Beijing landfill where he bought the negatives from a man who collected silver nitrate. As an “archive artist,” Sauvin has worked with Chinese artists, graphic designers and animators to turn the collection into a vast range of narrated artworks, including artist books, animated films, GIFs and installations. He has worked for the UK-based Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC) for whom he collects Chinese work, from contemporary art photography to period publications and anonymous photography. Sauvin has participated in exhibitions including Photographic Oddities from the AMC, Caochangdi Photo Festival, Beijing (2012), and more recently his project “Beijing Silvermine” was presented by Singapore International Photo Festival (2012); FORMAT Photo Festival, Derby, UK (2013); The Salt Yard, Hong Kong (2013); and Lianzhou Foto Festival (2013), China’s premier international photography festival, where it received New Photography Award of the Year.

Harrison Schaaf is a Los Angeles born-and-bread director, cinematographer and visual artist specializing in telling immersive visual stories around the globe. To date, Harrison has shot for clients in Shanghai, Patagonia, Taiwan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Beijing, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau, Los Angeles and New York. Harrison presented the photoessay “Tunnel Vision” in the first issue of Bajia.

SHEN Zejian is a human who creates things in San Francisco, CA. Her work includes illustrations, comics, animation, design, film and photography. These days she is the creative media producer at the SF Asian Art Museum, and sometimes she pets cute animals on the street. Zejian was in conversation with Chen Xi during the August 2014 A.M. Brainstorm. 

Kyle Skor 宋克叶 is a painter and picture book author from Saint Paul, MN. In recent years he has lived and travelled extensively in Asia, most recently working in South Korea, Taiwan, and China. With colorful, repetitive, and seemingly simple iconography, he looks to address issues surrounding individual psychology and its transitions through time, space, and other variables. Recently incorporating Buddhist thought with minimal, poetic text & abstract geometric forms, he also seeks to conjure secular meditative states for Generation Anxiety. Represented in Asia by Ying Gallery, he is working on paintings for upcoming shows in Germany, Japan, and Korea, in addition to a graphic novel about, among other things, dropping out of Harvard and being a roaming, more or less legitimately starving artist in a foreign land for years. Kyle was once a Bactagon team member, running A.M. Brainstorms, serving as the deputy co-editor of 八家 Bajia House 1, and further contributing animations to 八家 Bajia House 1 and 2.  

Joe Sneed is an artist and educator. Having spent the better part of 2011 in Beijing, Sneed – a foreigner to China, its culture and its language – was overwhelmed by the mass consumption, which while similar to that in the West, was perceived though the lens of an outsider. Trying to make sense of his Chinese experience, he worked as an archeologist – looking through the debris of that which was consumed to piece together a contemporary historical narrative. While his Western ideological background colored his organizational logic, this project – 100! Facts From China – was not created by him, but rather he was submitted to it. In a place where his language and logic had no context, these are “incidental facts. They are the products of a castrated artist." He presented this installation in the "Teetering at the Edge of the World" exhibition. 

SONG Yi 宋轶 is a curator, writer and filmmaker. He is one of the founders of the Migrant Workers Video Collective as well as is the founder of “Bloom 绽” curating collective for contemporary urban planning. He is currently  the artistic director of the independent art space Institute For Provocation. From 2013 - 2017, he served as the senior editor of LEAP Magazine, a leading bilingual magazine dedicated to contemporary Chinese art. From 2008 - 2012 he was the Head of Exhibitions at Long March Space gallery, where he coordinated the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” project.

Sponge Gourd Collective 丝瓜集团 is a loofah for the future, a squad of green goons, a slimy surprise. They investigate urban transformation to explore Chinese futurities. With backgrounds in visual art, photography, anthropology, community organizing, film, and literature, they develop multimedia projects that broaden popular conceptions of China, to leave more room for the blurry spaces in between. Their projects deconstruct unstable meanings of Chineseness and speak to Chinese youth and members of the global Chinese diaspora. Self-searching is a seed that sprouted this collective; as rapid development calls for a fluid, flexible future, our conceptions of identity too must remain open to flux. Sponge Gourd Collective publishes the zine series, People’s Square. Created for all the wandering tumbleweeds and curious cats who have found themselves lost in the dusty rubble of Chinese demolition, the comprising photography, ethnography and art found in People’s Square is a snapshot of the transient moments that make up China's rapacious urban development. Sponge Gourd Collective member, Daphne Xu, participated in Distribution Assembly East.

Matjaž Tančič is a Slovenian photographer, who lives and creates between Beijing and Ljubljana. He began his path as a photojournalist for Mladina magazine, but quickly made his way abroad – Matjaž is a graduate of the London College of Fashion. Matjaž has 68 group and 28 solo exhibitions behind him, with his work being featured in magazines such as Der Spiegel, Fast Company, Geo, National Geographic publications, L’Officiel Magazine, Vogue, Playboy, Elle, Tatler, Marrie Claire, amongst others. He has won awards in the Sony World Photography Organization 2013 contest, 3D category; a SloveniaPress Photo award 2012, Nature category; and was among the six finalists in the 2009 Google Photography Prize contest. 

TANG Di 唐棣 is a novelist and filmmaker. Having started his writing career in 2003, his works have be published in Today, Southern Weekly, Short Fiction (Taiwan), Hua Cheng, Chutzpah, and Zi Hua, amongst other prestigious arts publications across Mainland China and Taiwan. In 2008, he started producing short art films. In 2014, he finished his feature “A Man from Manchuria,” which was premiered in China during “The Bibliorium” symposium.

Carolina Muniz Vallarino is an artist and cultural producer in Montevideo, Uruguay. She is the co-founder of Acrahub, a new online gallery. Carolina was the executive producer of the exhibition, “Teetering at the Edge of the World.”

WAI Architectural Think Tank is an international studio practicing architecture, urbanism and architectural research. Founded in Brussels in 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, author and theorist Cruz Garcia and French architect, artist, author and poet, Nathalie Frankowski WAI and its parallel artist practice Garcia Frankowski are based in Beijing, Taliesin and Taliesin West where both directors, Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski are Visiting Teaching Fellows at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. WAI directors are also founding curators of Intelligentsia Gallery, an alternative art space in Beijing. WAI was in conversation with Jenny Chou for the July 2014 A.M. Brainstorm and also contributed the text “Suprematist Landscapes: Totems without Qualities” to 八家 Bajia House 1.

Wendy WANG 王敏 is a Beijing-based journalist and writer whose work mirrors her observations of contemporary China for over the past decade. Writing about design, art and lifestyle, she has interviewed a multitude of artists, architects, designers, film directors, actors and models from around the world. Her work has been published in a variety of magazines in China including Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, GQ, Vogue, and Elle, amongst others. She also writes poetry and fictional stories. Wendy contributed the short stories “Another Realm: A Use(less) Space” to 八家 Bajia House 1 and “The Sun Rises as Usual” to 八家 Bajia House 2.

WEN Hui 文慧 is one of the great modern dance choreographers in China. Originally a Chinese folk dancer in Yunnan, she attended the Department of Choreography of the Beijing Dance Academy and has been a choreographer and dancer in the Oriental Song and Dance Ensemble of China. In 1994, Wen Hui and the filmmaker Wu Wenguang co-founded China’s first independent dance theatre company, Living Dance Studio. The use of documentary film, dance theatre style, and creative sources and subject matters from Chinese daily life are the foci of Wen Hui’s works. In place of choreographed dance movements, Wen Hui is fond of improvisation based on the movements of people’s daily life, and she is highly interested in the movements that result from juxtaposing trained and untrained dancers. In the 八家 Bajia House 2 text, "Does Art Matter?" Wen Hui spoke with our editor, Wang Lijie.

Dr. XU Jing 徐菁博士 is an associate professor of Marketing at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. She is also the Vice Director of Behavioral Science Lab at Guanghua School of Management. Professor Xu earned her Ph.D. in Marketing from Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan in 2007. Professor Xu's research involves using psychological theories to understand how consumers form judgment and the process by which they make product choices. In particular, she is interested in studying how environmental cues or factors influence the consumers’ tendency to seek uniqueness in product choices. Dr. Xu worked together with her masters student, Chen Xinghui, to contribute to 八家 Bajia House 2. Together they researched and wrote a case study on the Digua Community, a social enterprise for basement dwellers in Beijing.

XU Tan 徐坦 was born in Wuhan, Hubei Province in 1957 and currently lives in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. In 1993, he became a member of the 'Big Tail Elephant Group' (Da Wei Xiang), an experimental artistic group formed in Guangzhou and whose work focused on the rampant urbanization of the Pearl Delta River region. Other works, like “Made in China,” shown in “Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World” at the Guggenheim (2017), presents his attempt to document how China’s budding consumerist revolution transformed the country’s domestic sphere. His work has been shown globally, including at the 53rd and 50th Venice Biennials, the 2nd Berlin Biennia, the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial and the 4th Gwangju Biennial, amongst others. For 八家 Bajia House 2, Xu Tan was in conversation with us and our gust editor, Huang Jingyuan, to discuss his socially engaged art practice and the collectively sourced language he has developed since 2005, in his “Keywords Project.” 

YAN Cong 烟囱 is a Beijing-based artist and animator. A former editor of famed independent publication Special Comix (Nanjing), Cong now produces Narrative Addition, an independent comic book that complies his own animated stories plus those of some of China’s best young animators. With nine issues to date, Narrative Addiction stands testament to the stories of Chinese youth living at the fringe of society and in the depths of subcultures. The series is a demonstration of youth collaboration in China today, as the book compiles works by artists who were met via social media networks, and is produced through extensive online communication. Yan Cong’s Narrative Addiction was exhibited in “Teetering at the Edge of the World.”

YAN Jun 颜峻 has a central figure of the music scene in Beijing since the mid-90s. He is known for his pioneering work in experimental and improvised music as well as poetry. His poems juxtapose the desensitization of modern society as it is absorbed by contemporary modalities of consumption, while serving as points for meditative, and at times, satirical reflection. Floating between DIY and institutional, experimental and academic, and between the music, contemporary art, and publishing scenes, Yan Jun is a representative of the cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary culture in Beijing. Founded in 2000, Subjam is an experimental and guerrilla art organization/collective that publishes and curates experiences for sound and music. It is also a record label as well as a publication (1998), which looks at the first wave of rock music in China. A selection of Yan Jun’s poems from 2004 - 2014 were exhibited together with the recording, Music for Listening on the Moon (2010) in “Teetering at the Edge of the World.” 

YAN Xing 鄢醒 is known for his multi-component, interdisciplinary projects that combine diverse media such as performance, video, photography, installation and painting. Yan Xing has built a complex, compelling body of work that reflects critically on how history is manufactured today. Through the intensive investigation of literature, history, and art theory, he has worked out an artistic narrative governed by its own logic. His works circulate around large themes such as negativity, resistance, and order, exploring their complex interrelations. Yan Xing was born in Chongqing and graduated from the Oil Painting department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2009.  In 2012 Yan Xing won the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Best Young Artist; that year, he also received a nomination for the Future Generation Art Prize from the Pinchuk Art Centre and Focus on Talents Project from Today Art Museum. His works have been featured at 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012); 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2012) and 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (2015), among others. His video work, ‘Arty, Super Arty' was included in the exhibition, “Teetering at the Edge of the World.” 

YANG Yuanyuan 杨圆圆 (aka Luka) is an artist based in Beijing, China. By experimenting with different ways of visual storytelling, she creates narratives where facts and fiction coexist to explore intersections between the individual and the collective memories. Most of her projects begin with investigating various sources of archives and are closely related to particular local histories. Yang’s work spans photography, text, video, installation, artist books and performance, these mediums intertwine with each other within her projects through different methodology. Yuanyuan received a BA (hons) in photography at London College of Communications, University of the Arts London in 2013. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally. In 2018, she was an Asia Cultural Council artist in residence  in New York City. She also works as the Beijing-based editor of Art World magazine. Yuanyuan’s performance, “Tracing (Chasing) Shadows within the Present Past” was installed and performed at The Bibliorium, and a selection of her project, “On the Shipwreck” was included in 八家 Bajia House 2 as a photographic essay.  

YE Linghan 叶凌瀚 is truly a multi-disciplinary artist, showing equal virtuosity in his works on paper, paintings, photography and digital work. His work has been exhibited at prestigious museums such as the Minsheng Art Museum, MOCA Shanghai and the Today Art Museum in Beijing and has been included in notable group exhibitions around the world. Ye attended the renowned China Academy of Art in Hangzhou where he studied traditional mural painting and drawing, his academic training evident in his highly detailed drawings and animations. Ye currently lives and works in Beijing. 

YI Hao 亦好 studied printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and often utilizes ready-made materials and familiar objects that serve as conventionally formed signs that often representing ideological conventions and/or social institutions. Seeking to undermine the reliability of these formalized surfaces, her process-based practice often “re-produces” these objects by destructing or subverting its formalized role. As such, she attempts to blur the boundaries between these representative articles and the non-objective. Most often, Yi Hao’s work reflects the formation of her own childhood identity existing within a contradictory system of indoctrination, social pressure and paternity. She now lives and works between Beijing and LA. Her work, "Paper Cuts 剪纸" (2014) was exhibited in The Bibliorium. 

YU Hong 喻红 is a painter in Beijing. Through her large scale paintings that are grounded in the Social Realist style, Yu Hong eschews anodyne depictions of smiling, hale workers, and instead explores the complex experience of contemporary Chinese women in her lush, expressive paintings. Working with oil, pastels, and fabric dye on canvas, silk, and resin, Yu Hong’s creation most often arises from her personal life and the surroundings of quotidian existence, constructing a world which ingeniously fuses together perceptions of time and memories through art, as well as adeptly seizing the sporadic evolution of the emotions of human self-experience. The series “Witness to Growth” (1999- ongoing) acts as a sort of record of life, while touching upon the current events of each year of her life. Yu Hong often uses existing images as a starting point for her art, taking photographs and her own point of view to create compositions and rearrange them in renewed combinations which emphasize the objective connotations of memory, and investigate the way in which pre-existing images can be re-used and strengthened in new compositions. In the “Gold” Series (2010-2011) of paintings, this feeling for form takes on its most poetic level. In this series, the artist’s intensive studies into the traditional Chinese paintings of Dunhuang, the murals of the Kizil Cave complex and traditional Western painterly traditions take form, interweaving a sensitivity towards art historical traditions and contemporary daily life. For 八家 Bajia House 1, Yu Hong was in conversation with Wang Lijie and Zandie Brockett, discussing her thoughts towards space in painting in the interview “Tensions within the Aesthetics of Space.”

ZHAO Liang 赵亮 is a independent Chinese documentary film director, known as part of the sixth generation filmmakers. Graduating from Luxun Fine Art Academy, he supported himself as a photographer while working on his early documentaries. Zhao's 2009 documentary “Petition: The Court of the Complaints” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and depicted the hidden lives led by those fighting the legal system in China. A radical shift from his previous documentary films, his most recent film, Behemoth (2015) juxtaposes the daily lives of Inner Mongolian coal-mine workers with those at an iron ore production plant in an allegorical reference to Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Mimicking the three-part epic poem in structure, the film explores the inferno (hell), purgatorio (purgatory), and paradisio (paradise) of contemporaneity in China, looking specifically at how notions of utopia and modern success have been equated with rampant urban development. The art house film uniquely interjects documentary footage with special effects-produced frames that allude to states of dream – or rather nightmare – that the filmmaker experiences as he tries to distinguish between the utopia/dystopia that contemporary China has become. Derived from Behemonth, his video installation Black Face, White Face (2014), a montage of images comment on the environmental degradation, class differences, and labor extortion that ensue the fragmented and unnatural growth of urban metropolises in China today. This work was exhibited in “Teetering at the Edge of the World.” 

ZHOU Tao 周滔 captures the miracles of daily life and finds visual and narrative materials for his arresting video works in the locales and communities he encounters daily. He has documented Guangzhou, where he lives and works, as well as New York, Paris, Bangkok, and Barcelona, cities where he has participated in residencies. From the film he records, he stitches together footage of real events, blurring the line between fiction and real life to create a meta-fiction. Moving beyond simply recording, Zhou’s lens seems to gaze at these scenes, often capturing living organisms, natural scenery, and inorganic matter, generating a sense of poetic intimacy through the prolonged act of looking. When exhibited, the videos are often presented together with his drawings and photographs. Zhao is from Changsha and received a BFA in oil painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA in Mixed-Media Studies. His film works, 1, 2, 3, 4 (2007 – 2008), which highlights how corporate culture in Asia emphasizes the collective identity of its workers, and how both workers and consumers conform to identities as defined by capitalism, and  Blue and Red (2014), which sequences film from Thailand during the winter 2013-2014 riots, and also from a public square in Guangzhou, China, into a single fictional narrative, were included in “Teetering at the Edge of the World.” 

ZHOU Zijian 周子鉴 works across various disciplines, with particular focus on design and filmmaking.  Growing up a visual designer, with a unique design language, his work has gained significant recognition and resultantly been included in many exhibition. His philosophy, trained in his undergraduate and graduate work at the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, considers not only layout and aesthetic, but also method and logic. His work “Bangs in Movies 电影中的枪击事件”was exhibited in The Bibliorium.

ZHU Jia 朱加 is a pioneer of video art in China. Always capturing ordinary scenes, his earliest works both pushed the method in which the footage was taken, but also the these video works were exhibited. In “Forever” (1994), Zhu attached a camera to the left wheel of a bicycle. The artist rode this bicycle over 10km around the city of Beijing, catching images of daily life through a truly unique perspective. In the work “Did they have sex?” he held up a sign, posing this very question, in front of arbitrarily chosen couples on the street and took photos, asking the viewer to generate their own answer. By establishing these fictitious relationships, the artist discusses different people's attitudes towards the sensitive issue of sex. He has been included in exhibitions at M+ (Hong Kong), Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), MoCA (New York), National Art Museum of China (Beijing), and included in biennales in Shanghai, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Sydney and Shenzhen. His work Zero (2012) explores the obscure gap between a city’s present, as constructed by a collection of subjective experiences, and its history, as a product of collective memory. Like a dream that teeters between present reality and recollections of the past, Zero offers viewers a certain freedom in perceptions of and obligations to life. This work was exhibited in “Teetering at the Edge of the World.”