She Has Long Talks With Every Creator She Admires, and Turned Nearly 100,000 Words Into a Magazine

Be Water Journal is a magazine made by a magazine lover.

On the first day of 2018, a magazine called 《水象》 came out — its English name is Be Water Journal. An article recommending the debut issue put it this way: "No more looking around in every direction. Bend down instead and work a single plot of land carefully, like a farmer, and live with both feet on the ground."

Be Water Journal is a 284-page annual. Besides photographs, it carries nearly 100,000 words of interviews, took two years to make, and comes with a small English-language booklet.

Editor-in-chief Amy says the name comes from a line of Bruce Lee's: "Be water, my friend." She wants the magazine to be like water — taking "people" as its connecting point, following social questions raised by globalization, holding on to a consciousness of Chinese culture while working across different cultures, and answering social and cultural questions head-on.

The first issue came in two covers, green and white, under the theme "Creating the Possibilities of Life." Amy thinks people today grow up in a world where "every question has only one answer," so most lives turn out much the same. For this issue she interviewed people from different fields: independent fashion designers Zhang Da and Dooling, young artist Lu Shan, Spanish stylist Raquel Sanchez, and American photographer Rian Dundon.

These people, from very different backgrounds, each answer in their own way the everyday questions most of us overlook, and their work shows the living texture of different cities. An Ran, who moved to Dali in Yunnan, founded the home-goods brand Xishe in 2011; she works with craftspeople from several ethnic groups, doing patient work by hand, and has helped people on the margins find a place for themselves in an anxious age. Lu Shan painted a series about Xiaobei in Guangzhou, the largest African community in Asia, using her pictures to ask how different communities live side by side. Raquel, the Spanish stylist now based in Guangzhou, photographed older people with all kinds of faces on Guangzhou's streets, looking for "real fashion" — she thinks young people today all dress more or less alike, which does not stir her curiosity. Rian Dundon, a photographer from California, spent years living in Changsha, and recorded the plain, real scenes of both cities: a Changsha under the wrecking ball, where people threw themselves into a raw, full-blooded nightlife, and Silicon Valley in California, where fast-moving new technology was changing how the city lived.

Friends of hers were puzzled: with everyone writing print media's obituary, why go to all this clumsy trouble to make a magazine?

For the past dozen-odd years, Amy's life has been bound up with magazines. She now owns more than 200 different titles, and she has lived through the industry's whole arc from boom to decline.

In 1998, Amy was a student in Changsha. In her spare time she started an independent band called Watercell with some foreign friends, and built a website called Hunan Rock Outpost, a gathering place for rock fans, where she interviewed local bands and covered shows.

Her collection still holds a 1998 issue of Music Heaven. Founded in 1992, it came with an audio disc and was one of the first publications in China to bring Western pop music to a wide audience. It closed in 2006, having lived through the golden age of magazines — a time when information was scarce. Called the bible of Chinese fans of Western music, Music Heaven swept college campuses, and at its peak its circulation topped 200,000 copies a month.

School bored her, so in 2001, still short of 20, Amy dropped out and went to Shenzhen to write copy at an advertising agency. She kept busy after hours too, starting an art-film club with a few friends. "Back then we'd burn discs of obscure foreign films and screen them. It wasn't as easy as it is now, when you can just download whatever you want," Amy says.

Amy became a magazine person in the full sense of the word when she joined Neway China. Neway China billed itself as a "young women's fashion magazine," but it was not like the popular women's titles of the day, such as Rayli and CoCo, which stuck mainly to clothes and beauty. Alongside fashion and trends it ran pieces on "ways of living," "ways of spending," and "the world beyond China."

At the same time, Amy and a friend started the online magazine after 17. Its subject was women's creative work and lives around the world; through sites like MySpace and Flickr, Amy came to know photographers and makers everywhere, and she also ran on-the-ground reports filed by correspondents in Toronto, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. At a time when online magazines were not yet a trend, after 17, made purely out of interest, reached a peak of 300,000 downloads for a single issue.

In 2007, Amy and a photographer who went by "No. 223" spent every last yuan of their savings and made TOO together. Pitched at a young, style-conscious reader, the magazine owed a lot to foreign titles popular at the time, such as The Face and Dazed & Confused — bilingual in Chinese and English, printed in a large 16mo format, with bold, brightly colored illustrations inside. It interviewed overseas creatives like Maywa Denki and Chisato Shinya, and used a "City Live" format to record daily life in Paris, London, New York, and Guangzhou.

The debut issue of TOO ran to 3,000 copies, sold on consignment in more than 20 bookstores and small design shops across the mainland, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, and also on Taobao, which was still far from universal then — there it sold one or two hundred copies in three months. Later Amy began to feel she "didn't want to make a magazine that looked like a foreign magazine," but she couldn't think of a better approach, and between that and the editorial team's limited time, plans for a second issue of TOO stalled.

Amy then joined City Pictorial as its Beijing-based editor and reporter. It was the Olympic year, and the first issue she worked on was themed "The Invisible Beijing."

She remembers that City Pictorial, still a biweekly then, "had a very strong editorial and photography team. Everyone followed what was changing across China closely, especially in culture and design. For basically every city feature we'd send two photographers, three or four reporters, and one or two editors to spend weeks on location, interviewing and shooting."

The Olympics brought Beijing a rich, noisy run of art and culture events, and pushed up the cost of living across the board.

In 2011, Amy quit City Pictorial and went freelance, picking up planning work through friends. But she never stopped following magazines, and came to see more and more clearly that her sense of many things came from them. "If I see a brand, say, I'll think, this brand feels a lot like the style of Gentle Women, that one feels like Fantastic Magazine, this is the visual style that suits it — all of that comes from magazines."

Amy does not seem to treat magazine-making as a business; it is closer to a passion. Her interview-based writing project will carry on under different themes, with one or two long interviews each year with creators she admires, set alongside shorter pieces.

We talked with Amy about more.

Q: Can you tell us why you chose to publish independently?

A: There really aren't many people making magazines independently the way I do, because a lot of people use their connections and choose to work with big publishers or brands. My husband says to me: you've been making magazines for so many years, and you're still doing it independently — isn't that a step backward? I don't think so. What I want is to keep a relatively large amount of freedom — to control what paper we use, what production process, what we report and edit.

When I interview publishers abroad, the reason they started is often the same: they couldn't find a magazine they wanted to read, so they simply made one, and they wanted to stay independent. Being able to do what you love is already a good thing in itself.

Q: Why did you pick these particular people for the first issue?

A: What draws me are outsiders of a sort — people doing something that matters but that tends to get overlooked. So I interviewed them purely out of my own admiration for them, and because the questions they work on are ones I care about too.

Take the fashion designers Zhang Da and Dooling: they draw nourishment from Chinese tradition and turn it into their own designs. Or small home-goods brands like GUR in Portugal and Xishe in Dali: they too hold on to tradition, and in doing so they have helped other people. In a way they are social enterprises, tiny individual forces.

There's also a section on cities. When I was at City Pictorial I did a lot of city features, and that shaped me, so I brought my interest in urban culture into this issue too — finding photographers and illustrators, and looking at how they record and reflect the changes in cities in their own ways.

Q: You spent a year and a half on follow-up interviews. Why did it have to be done that way?

A: I've been interested in people since I was a child. I started interviewing local bands at 17 or 18. My working life since has been the same — I've always been hooked on interviewing. The biggest difference this time is the span of time. I was watching a documentary yesterday that said art is achieved through time, and I keep finding that to be true.

At first I wanted to do something like the German magazine mono.kultur, which interviews one person per issue, with each interview taking three to six months. Over a year and a half you can watch the person change. I think that brings something fresh, so it doesn't stay on the surface. Take Zhang Da. When we first met in Shanghai, he said he was unhappy with his designs of the past few years — he felt he had lost a little of the spirit of exploration and experiment in his work. He came to see this himself and slowly began to find his way back to where he started. He skipped a season and made a new collection called "Everyday Use," and in his last two seasons you can see him taking more risks with the structure and the ideas of the clothes. As the person recording it, I got to watch that turn.

A lot of outlets now, official accounts and so on, care about producing large volumes of content fast, while traditional print puts more weight on custom, painstaking craft. If we want to keep exploring what print can do, we should set it apart from the qualities of digital media; each has its strengths. Print, for instance, suits long, deep pieces; in design and binding you can use different papers and printing techniques to give print, as a physical thing, a solid, rich feel in the hand. Some of the valuable things at the core of print in the past shouldn't be thrown away, but we can also go looking for different channels, formats, ways of selling and ways of promoting the work, and meet the changes happening now head-on.

Q: What do you think sets Be Water Journal apart from other magazines?

A: When we started I hadn't thought its character through all that clearly, but making the first issue made it clearer and clearer.

First, it is a magazine rooted in China. Early on we wanted to stress what is Eastern, or what carries Chinese DNA, in what we report and in how it looks. We care about the changes on our own soil, but we're not shut off either — we want to learn from and follow the cultures of other places. And we believe ancient Eastern wisdom — Eastern philosophy, Laozi and Zhuangzi, the Book of Changes, its attention to nature and to people — can offer different possibilities and different answers to the problems of modern society, and perhaps a second look at modernized culture as a whole.

Second, our focus is on people and on certain social questions. We're interested in creative people, but not just in how brilliant their work is; we'd rather keep the whole picture in view, and look at the culture behind the work and how it connects to history, society and daily life. I know lifestyle content has become more popular with readers in recent years, but plenty of outlets are already doing it and they don't need us. Much of that work is good, of course, but we'd like to go one step further: a cup of coffee is never simply a drink; behind it is the whole development of agriculture, the lives of people in the growing regions, the rivalries between regions, and so on. The BBC has made films about tea and coffee that lay out the whole chain clearly, and touch on exactly the points I just mentioned.

Q: Do you think cultural content and commerce can be balanced?

A: Balance is a big subject, in any field.

It's just that in China everything, in every respect, is done Great Leap Forward style. I was reading Hu Lancheng today, and he writes that periods of reflection keep recurring through human history. I feel we're in one now. We've reached a point where we need to think again about "modernization" and what it has done — we can ask ourselves more often whether the values we take for granted, the pursuit of "faster, bigger, better," are the right ones. Do they really make people happy? Watching your own inner life grow, and thinking often about your own values — that is something we hope to argue for too.

Images courtesy of the interviewee

Photography: Yang Hongxun, Amy

(Amy is a pen name.)