Shao Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to cultural production and social engineering. We curate exhibition, engage people in conversation, and make our works accessible to the general public. If you are working on an insanely great project, talk to us.

So, exhibition, conversation event and book publishing constitute our own ‘Three-Legged Stool’. Exhibition, of course, is self-explanatory. We have two spaces in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively. Those who’ve been to our opening solo exhibition of Huang Rui is already familiar with the Beijing one (called BAMA). Info about the Shanghai space will be revealed on our website in due course. In addition to the regular exhibition, we intend to use the Beijing space as the main site for CROSSTALK Beijing, aka ‘conferences and symposia that do not suck’. (Or at least we hope so.) The goal here is to reinvigorate a format that’s supposed to be intense and stimulating but instead has been, more often than not, weakly implemented. Has conversation expired? Are forum and conference being reduced to the exchange of truism? Is ‘lecture followed by Q&A session’ the optimised way to enable communication? How can we extend the lifespan of a temporary event, so that its intellectual outcome can reach out to people who may not be able to attend it? These are some of the fundamental issues we would like to address with CROSSTALK Beijing.

The people behind Shao Foundation come mostly from a contemporary art or design background. As a team, however, we don’t necessarily focus only on the aesthetic aspects of everything we do—although that’s important too. With every project, social engineering remains a priority. Proto-Shao Foundation examples of social concerns include Ou Ning (current SF director)’s Dazhalan Project, which engages the original resident of a demolished community to produce his own video documentation of the process; and the decision to use shopping malls as the exhibition venues of the second Get It Louder exhibition in 2007. With the third GIL and the Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism coming afoot next year (both of which SF will be in charge), we are going to further experiment with various ways to activate public participation.

As an organisation associated with Modern Media Group—one of the most successful media groups in China, it’s only natural that there should be a publishing arm within Shao Foundation. We will be publishing a series of books on a wide range of topics, including art, design, architecture, futurism, and even Science Fiction! They could either be the Chinese edition of books written in other languages, or original Chinese book, or bilingual edition. The first two books in the series will be the Chinese editions of Hou Hanru’s On the Mid-Ground and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s …dontstopdontstopdontstopdontstop.

Needless to say, we are always open to ideas and projects from the outside. If you are an artist, designer, architect, scholar, or ‘cultural producer’ of any sorts looking for collaboration, feel free to drop us a line at info [at] shaofoundation.org.cn.