Shao Foundation is honoured to host 'Lijiang Studio: Experiments in the New Countryside Laboratory', a talk and discussion session by Jay Brown, co-founder and director of Lijiang Studio. It will be the first of our serial conversation programme CROSSTALK Beijing.

Brown has been working full-time for Lijiang Studio since Feburary, 2004. Located 20 km west of Lijiang, Yunnan, the Studio is a free-form collective of rotating artists, researchers, scientists, farmers, and others working with any medium or discipline. In 2005, Lijiang Studio started bringing artists to the farming community, expecting that the experience would change the people involved and interrogate how art is made. Based in a village, Lijiang Studio's laboratory is the transition of rural China into the current phase of global neo-liberal capitalism. Being in the middle of Naxi, Pumi, Lisu, Yi, Bai, Han and Tibetan ethnicities on the edge of China allows the studio to see both mainstream and marginal Chinese culture at work. The studio has been aiming at subtle investigations of love, suicide, and mysticism; experimental architecture and student labor; social sculpture and biodynamic agriculture; and even utopian attempts to aestheticize eco-felicitous, bioremediating mushroom sculptures.

Brown studied Chinese language, the history of Chinese art, and contemporary art at Princeton University, where he co-founded with Steve Caputo an innovative architectural design competition called Prospects, and founded Paideia, a group that brings students and professors together for discussions over meals. He has worked for the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Beginning in 2002, Brown worked for The Nature Conservancy's China Program based in Kunming, the Yunnan provincial capital. He co-founded Lijiang Studio in 2004 with Chinese painter Mu Yuming, and is the president of the Lijiang Studio Foundation.

CROSSTALK Beijing is a new kind of conversation programme conceived and presented by Shao Foundation. We invite artists, scientists, thinkers, architects, designers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, futurists and software developers to a lecture or conference setting, confronting them with the live feedback from the audience—local and remote—through the use of new web technology known as 'Micro-blogging'. The event is free.

Documentation