All posts tagged: Poverty

Uyghur Kids And Their “Dream From The Heart”

Published by Darren Byler

PPTV version of the above video here for those without access to YouTube. A recent Uyghur-language short film called “Dream From the Heart” (English and Chinese subtitles) tells the story of a group of boys from Qaraqash, a county of more than half a million people in Southern Xinjiang. Shot as part of China Southern Airlines’s new ad campaign by the award-winning director Zhang Rongji (张荣吉), the film references the true stories of how self-taught and underfunded young people from the deep poverty of Hotan and Kashgar prefectures struggle to compete with more privileged opponents. So many teams of young confident athletes, musicians, speech competitors, and scientists in Southern Xinjiang practice all of their lives to reach the big stage in the city, only to find themselves blocked by the logistics of getting across the country or traveling across the globe. Many times they don’t have the equipment, the coaching, worldly knowledge, or the political support of people in the cities – all they have is a will to succeed and the toughness that comes from …

Liu Xiaodong’s “Hotan Project” and the Xinjiang Biennale

Published by Darren Byler

In 2012 Liu Xiaodong was named the “most socially aware figure of the year” by Art Gallery magazine. He had just completed his Hotan Project in the deep south of Xinjiang. Utilizing his famously “plein air” method, Liu set up his giant life-sized canvases in the middle of a Hotan river floodplain and lived with Uyghur jade pickers. He spent the summer with them in the dust and the heat; in shelters made of stones and earth. In Art Gallery’s assessment of his project he attempted to capture “the rhythms of people’s lives and the status of their survival.” This is not the first difficult project Liu has carried out. Liu is famous for them. From the Three Gorges Dam, to the Wenchuan earthquake site, to the Tibetan plateau, to inner city youth in Boston, to his most recent project “between Palestinians and Israelis,” Liu seems fascinated by difference, trauma and hardship. Perhaps this related to his position in the Chinese avant-garde art scene. If you look through Ai Weiwei’s images from his time in …

Hong Qi, the Uyghur Folksinger who grew up Han

Published by Darren Byler

The Uyghur Chinese musician and poet Hong Qi celebrated his forty-first birthday last May 6. He doesn’t know if that day was really his birthday. He said his mother just guessed. There is a lot that Hong Qi doesn’t know about his origins. He is one of those rare Uyghurs who grew up thinking he was Han. Hong Qi was born into a situation of extreme poverty. Hotan—the prefecture in the south of Xinjiang where he lived until age three—is the poorest prefecture in the nation. According to government statistics, in 2012 the average per capita income for the 2 million Uyghurs in Hotan was $183. Although he was born in a prefecture where the population was more than 90 percent Uyghur, Hong Qi didn’t realize he was Uyghur until he was 16. That was when his Han parents told him he was adopted. Like many military families in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, Hong Qi moved a lot as a kid. He spent significant portions of his childhood in Ürümchi. He read a …