My early years were spent in a small village yard in Shanxi, China with my grandparents, who were peasants. They planted a pomegranate tree because I liked pomegranate. They have died, but the tree is alive and growing wild.

When I found myself studying contemporary art in California and Cambridge when I was in my 20s, I felt impossible to communicate the world and the work I was in now with my rusty earliest self and its community. My art since then has always been various attempts to do this impossible communication, but with other people and communities.

Work

Artistic Research & Practice

• Co-Founder, SOCIAL PRACTICE ART WIKI (Currently Under Renovation, 2017-) An attempt to build a Chinese-language database of radical performance social art projects that the public can DIY in their everyday life with zero cost and zero professional background. Also a digital garden for me to learn in public and research in public. ****https://youcanmake.art
• Co-Founder, Dali Open Source House (2023-) Free residency and public programs for open source art and technology contributors https://DaliOpen.com
• Co-Founder, Social Practice Art Online Learning Community (2022-23) The first Chinese-language online course on social practice art. Hundreds of students have taken the course. Early students were mostly urban young people, and later included a small number of former factory workers, middle school drop-outs, and rural housewives. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fr8K7Z3zMMMZ2LroaeXmTw
• Co-Founder, TST Diving Platform (2017-2019) A platform for non-artists to start performance and public art experiments. https://tst.commotion.page/
• Co-organizer, Urbanism\Architecture Bi-City Biennale (UABB) of Shenzhen and Hong Kong official public programs (2017)
• Artist Individual and group participation in exhibitions include V&A Shenzhen Design Museum, Shanghai Biennale, Guangzhou Fei Art Museum, UABB, Beijing Gallery Weekend, Goethe-Institut Beijing, Framer Framed Amsterdam, Hong Museum Wenzhou, Tai Kwun Museum of Art Hong Kong, SYNNIKA Frankfurt

Communities: Research & Practice

• Co-Founder & Teacher, ShanzhaiMFA (”Fake Art School”) (2023-) A small edupunk institution with two tiny campuses with classrooms and dorms in semi-rural Dali and Chaoshan, China. Inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s Shanzhai, Rancière’s *The Ignorant Schoolmaster* and Proletarian Nights.

Originality is banned, creativity is banned — only Shanzhai (copycat) is allowed. Professionals are also banned, our teachers are amateurs, fortune tellers, Chaozhou braised goose cooks, a local Buddhist nun, a Meituan delivery man, village mothers, and sometimes street weirdos.

We learn conceptual writing by shouting on megaphones, we make performance art as routine morning workouts, we do non-fiction journalism through theater, we touch each other’s bodies by joining Mosuo/Naxi rituals and Teochew opera and Yingge dance, we do social theory by writing and drawing on the wall on the streets, and sometimes we dance about architecture as we write about art.

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/gniCKwCf9puBE9sBVW3VfA

• Co-Founder & Worker, ChaoCoop (2020-22) A tiny Chaoshan rural co-operative of village mothers that makes clothes production and sometimes theatrical video art production. https://coop.commotion.page/ https://synnika.space/events/mothers-ultra
• Co-Organizer & Worker, Proletarian Nights event series (Winter 2018) A series of events for young and middle-aged industrial workers in Guangzhou. Short notes on workers & art
• Contributor, Digital Palace of Culture, a Dali+ online project 1001 Small Towns documents radical proletarian cultural practitioners in 20+ small towns outside urban centers. It is supported by Dali+, a co-living community of digital nomads consisting of three buildings in Dali. I also serve as a board member for Dali+. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/76766MOhC6qz1di6EGYXRQ

Selected Essays/Presentations

DIY Wiki and Social Programming

@WUHAN Annual Conference of Network Society, China Academy of Art

diy wiki and social programming.pdf

If Society is Programming Us, How Do We Program Society: Avant-Garde Art Actions & AI

@CHIANG MAI WAMO 2023, a Web3 conference

@SHANGHAI Artificial Intelligence Hackathon, China Academy of Art

Open Sourcing Theater into the Everyday: Examples from a Rural Art Cooperative & an Edupunk Community

****@MUJIAYUAN VILLAGE Rural Theater Festival 2024

@ONLINE Community Public Art (CAP Talks) Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany

Ritual & Art: Indigenous, Ethnic Minority Communities and Social Practice Art of 1000 Years

@JIEYANG ShanzhaiMFA

@ONLINE