All posts tagged: Art

An Interview on Xinjiang w. Yi Xiaocuo of the “Camp Album” Project

Published by Yi Xiaocuo

This interview between Yi Xiaocuo and Matt Dagher-Margosian first appeared on the website Asia Art Tours. It is reprinted here with permission. Asia Art Tours and The Arts of Travel podcast hosts print and audio conversations, centered on creative voices in Asia. For more conversations on Japan, Thailand , Indonesia, Taiwan and elsewhere, come visit their platforms, or get in touch at matt@asiaarttours.com For victims of state violence or those witnessing its horror, knowing how to help and how to imagine a way forward may be the most urgent task. With that in mind, (Asia Art Tours) was joined by Yi Xiaocuo an art activist and creator of the Camp Album to discuss the current state violence and concentration camps built and managed by the Chinese government in the shared homeland of the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks and other Indigenous peoples. ASIA ART TOURS: What can you tell us about your background? Why did you decide to start your website? YI XIAOCUO:  I belong to one of the Turkic ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang. I was in grad school in …

Friends from Xinjiang: Fight Back with Your Art!

Published by Darren Byler

CALL FOR ART! Join the scholar Yixiaocuo and contribute to the Camp Album Project   The Camp Album is a multimedia project envisioned as a way for people from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to express their feelings in a safe and anonymous way while raising awareness of the ongoing human rights abuse and cultural genocide that confronts Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim minorities in the region. Fight your anxiety and depression, show the world what your trauma looks and feels like, and take back your power! Minority artists from the region whose families are directly impacted by the camps are particularly encouraged to contribute to the project. Submissions will be collectively displayed online and at exhibitions worldwide to amplify Uyghur, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Hui, and Tatar diaspora voices and stories. Exhibiting on a single platform will form solidarity and community for healing, and most importantly, give you a stronger voice! Follow this link for the official “CALL FOR ART.”   Below is a selection of art created by Yixiaocuo, other minority artists from Xinjiang, and allies …

An Introduction to The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia

Published by Darren Byler

I first came to Xinjiang in 2003. At the time I was in the second year of an undergraduate program in photojournalism in my home state of Ohio. As part of my training I had the opportunity to travel throughout China, from Shenyang to Lhasa. It gave me a chance to try to understand the breadth and diversity of the space and get a feel for a profession and a country that would have a large impact on my life. Eventually I ended up in Kashgar. I had never seen anything like it: vibrant street life, warm and embracing friendships, a vibrant folk music scene, desert landscapes and Sufi shrines. The history of the place felt alive and vivid, but also fragile. It was also the only place in China where Han taxi drivers, shop keepers and hotel clerks assumed I, a white German-American, was a local Uyghur. That misrecognition, like the built environment, was also instructive. It taught me something about privilege and passing; and what the racial politics of Xinjiang might feel like …

New Uyghur Interior Design and the Art of Dilmurat Abdukadir

Published by Darren Byler

On the top floor of the Aq Saray or the White Palace hotel in Ürümchi is a massive reproduction of Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David. He is flanked on his left by a reproduction of Ivan Kramskoi’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman (which everyone associates with Anna Karenina). Across the expansive red room, otherwise decorated in the style of a Russian tea room, gigantic reproductions of Venetian canals and cityscapes fill out the walls. Overhead murals of clouds, star constellations, and pheasants in flight glow against the ornate heavy white archways that surround them. The paintings are the works of Dilmurat Abdukadir– who was hired by the owner of the restaurant to produce life-sized images of paintings the owner had found on the Internet. The space is fascinating. Not only does it unapologetically embrace an amalgam of European aesthetics, but it is symptomatic of larger trends in Uyghur restaurant politics and aesthetics. Somewhere around 2008, scholars began to notice that Turkish imports were on the rise in Xinjiang. Suddenly chocolates from the massive …