Yesterday was mid-autumn festival. The day before, Fat Bird held its second salon, this time at Rao Xiaojun’s studio, Raw Designs. The first salon featured poetry readings by Steven Schroeder, Yi Jihui, and Yang Qian, as well as pictures by Kit Kelen and Mary Ann O’Donnell. Kelen also contributed a music composition.

The second Fat Bird salon functioned as an open workshop, with an audience of 15 people watching, listening, and commenting on the work-in-progress, which is tentatively called “Materializations”. Over the summer, Liu Hongming, Yang Jie, Ma Yuan, Yang Qian, and O’Donnell met together to discuss how one might create within and beyond disciplinary constraints. By training, Liu is a dancer, Yang Jie a violinist, Ma an architect, Yang Qian a journalist, and O’Donnell an anthropologist. Each is interested in reworking the materiality of their art. For Liu, this has meant retraining his body to move both arrhythmically and distanced from music. Yang Jie taped the sounds of moving water—urine, tap water, rain, a shower—and then digitally manipulated these sounds, adding vocals and piano. Ma has been using sculpture to redefine space. Yang Qian read from “Language Materializes,” a series of written pieces, which explore cultural grammars (rather than events) as generative of meaning. In an attempt to move away from ethnographic documentary conventions, O’Donnell presented 15 photographs of Shenzhen walls.

The work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham has inspired this ongoing collaboration, as the five work independently on specific projects and then present them together at different sites. Participants can then use the others’ works in the creations of new projects, expanding the definition of “site” to include video projects, installations, and new texts that grow out of the conversation and its realization as a particular “salon”. In addition to emphasizing the way that meaning materializes through chance operations, these projects, both separately and collaboratively, mobilize self-reflexivity in the service of creativity. Indeed, this has been one of Fat Bird’s core obsessions: what does it mean to be an artist in a city like Shenzhen, where there are few organizations dedicated to creating and presenting new art? Of course, the upside of the material constraints that artists working in Shenzhen face has been to force creative to cross-disciplinary lines, both within and beyond their circles, generating a wonderful eclecticism.