Magnus Ericson: You are a graphic designer and artist but also a curator, filmmaker and writer. Please tell me a little about your background?

Ou Ning: I was born in 1969. That year, Woodstock Music Festival was held in New York state and China’s Cultural Revolution went into its third year. I like to categorize myself as 1960ers because later in my life I was deep influenced by the spiritual heritage of the protest campaign all around the world at that age, although I didn’t come to life until the end of it. From 1989 to 1993, I studied in a university in China’s first special economic zone, Shenzhen. My major was mass communication. Yet early at the age of 16, I started to write poems already and when in university I participated in the New Wave movement of Chinese contemporary poetry. My literary creation and publication activities lasted until when I was 26 years old. From then on, my interests started to switch to music.

I organized large amount of music performances in the two biggest cities in the south of China, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, mainly to spread Beijing’s emerging Rock’n’Roll movement in the south. At the same time, I also brought the avant-garde musicians of the US, Europe and Japan to Beijing via Hong Kong. I inherited the tradition of independent organization and underground publication in early poetic movements. The music organization I founded is called New Masses. I was organizing music concerts and at the same time writing music reviews, publishing underground music magazines and promoting the independent music culture. I got fascinated in anarchism.

At that moment, Macintosh computers entered China’s market. For the needs of independent publication, I started to learn graphic design by myself. I liked the styles of David Carson and Vaughan Oliver because they were both serving at music magazines and record labels by then. In 1999, I published New Sound of Beijing. It concerns the arisen band culture in Beijing influenced by global information coming from internet. That’s the fruit of my first trial of graphic design. After that, large numbers of China’s contemporary artists, art museums, galleries, media and publishers and international exhibitions began to commission design works to me.

My interest of film comes from the pirate DVDs. They come with large variety but cost almost nothing, which helped me complete a study of film history by myself. I founded film organization U-thèque where we screened and discussed films and published independent film magazines. In 2003, for the first time, I organized the members to shoot a film. We were concerning about the biggest urban village in Guangzhou, San Yuan Li. The project got participated in Zone of Urgency, the exhibition curated by Hou Hanru as part of Biennale di Venezia that year. This is also the beginning for me to become an artist and get involved in contemporary art. Because I often participated in exhibitions, I started to play the curator role also. In 2005 and 2007, I founded and directed two Get It Louder exhibitions.

Magnus Ericson: Can you briefly tell me about some of your most important projects right now?

Ou Ning: I’m preparing an art and design exhibition commissioned by Nike. It will take place during Olympics in Beijing. Later on, the focus of my work will be on publication. I have started cooperation with an official publisher in China and will publish the Chinese version of Hou Hanru’s corpus, On The Mid-ground and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s don’tstopdon’tstopdon’tstop. I’m the guest editor and art director of the two books and will supervise the quality of them on editing, translating, design, printing and all. I will also write a book about China’s new-generation artists and designers and will publish it with the archives of Get It Louder exhibitions in 2005 and 2007.

Another project that I’ve planed for a long time is to do rural construction and practise rural life in the villages of Yixian (close to Mount Huang) in Anhui Province. I think these years China’s urbanization have not only consumed the farmland of rural areas but also hollowed out the human resources in rural society. The prosperity of cities is based on the desertion of villages. Under such reality of China’s reversal of the positions of urban and rural areas, if elites in urban areas flow back to rural areas and plant the urban capital, culture and human resources into rural areas, it will help to revive these forgotten lands. I will do research and education on aged architecture and rural tribe society with some poets, artists, designers and architects and will carry out a series of experiment on folk arts, ecologic architecture and organic agriculture. You will see the result of our practices in publications, website and exhibitions.

Magnus Ericson: You are active within various fields of artistic practice (and as a curator you move freely between art and design). How do you see the relation between art and design?

Ou Ning: I never deliberately differentiate art and design in my own creative practices. My works are sometimes defined as art, sometimes as design and sometimes as even other things. Therefore, it happens that the same work of mine will participate in both art exhibitions and design exhibitions. To separate art and design is to meet the needs of traditional social division and operation systems and also the needs of the distribution of social interests. Social division came up during the process when simple social production develops and gets complicated. People develop different specialties in complicated social operation and at the same time start to build up different ramparts to protect their own interests. However, today, with the development of internet and free circulation of information, it’s more convenient for people to learn by themselves and update their knowledge. Technology democracy and communion concept are winning more popularity. Different fields start to mingle with each other. And crossover experiment becomes the trend of today’s creation. All these phenomena indicate that to insist the difference of art and design is quite out-dated.

Magnus Ericson: You have been involved in different projects that deal with alternative cultural activities. You have organized urban research and documentation projects as San Yuan Li. How do you see the role of art and design when it comes to social and political changes?

Ou Ning: Social transformation is a very complicated process. It can’t be done individually. People often criticize artists and designers for they have the willing to transform society but have no power to realize it. But we shouldn’t look down upon the efforts of every individual, especially the foresights and creation of artists and designers. The evolvement of society is composed of these every little bit of progress. As the representatives of human’s advanced notions, artists and designers must have concerns about society and push the history move forward by their earnest practices.

When I started San Yuan Li project in 2003, the mainstream point of view by then is that this area is a pain in the eye for the society with its high density, residents’ complicated backgrounds and high rate of criminals. By interview, research and documentation, we not only find out San Yuan Li’s problems are due to the reasons on land system but also the beauty of this urban village: It preserves the social structure and life style of rural tribes, which provides us a multi-unit ecologic sample different from urban areas; it’s a neighborhood active for 24 hours everyday and its high density, multifunction and miscellaneity can satisfy all the needs of residents there; it accepts the city’s immigrants and low-incomers, provides them a cushion area in mainstream society and ease up the potential conflicts resulted from the gap between the poor and the rich and class differences. Through writing, publication and documentary film, we prompted people to reconsider the cultural value of urban villages. After 2004, large numbers of architects, urban planners, urbanism scholars and architecture exhibitions and art exhibitions started to concern the phenomenon of urban villages. I believe this will have deep influence on the preservation, administration, reconstruction and development on urban villages which widely exist in cities of China.

Later on, in 2005, I started to pay attention to Beijing’s slum Da Zha Lan. To some degree, our work changed people’s view on such poor neighborhood. With the confidence brought my practices, I believe art activities can definitely change society.

May 19-21, 2008, via emails between Stockholm and Beijing,with April Zhang's help.
Magnus Ericson is the project manager of IASPIS(International Artists' Studio Program in Sweden), Stockholm