Great Little Studios: 6 Reasons They're Worth Watching

Forget the buzzword "small and beautiful" — freedom and creativity are the things that actually shine.

If you skim ahead through the 45 small studios named in this article, you'll notice that although their fields differ, many threads run through all of them.

Some people, when they talk about a hobby, are really talking about the people who share it; when they talk about a scene, they're really talking about how the city has changed; when they talk about how the city has changed, they're really talking about their own lives. In the end they all share one identity: creators in the city.

These people have energy, ideas, and a certain sparkle to their state of mind (and they've held onto it so far). They shouldn't simply be filed under "entrepreneur." Now that the word has been inflated into a bubble and an ideology, we want to mark off something purer — the way the internet commentator Keso put it in an interview for our "Internet 1999" series: "I prefer the person who's original, who charges in before finding an escape route, over the person who only shows up once they sense there's a lot of opportunity here and funding to be had."

To be clear about exactly what we mean, we've drawn up some criteria for these urban creators:

• Offers everyone interested in it at least one idea and one way of living

This is probably the most important one. "Studio" is a fairly broad concept — from handmade crafts to study-abroad services, "studio" in its ordinary sense just means a work unit with very few people, so not every studio falls within QDaily's field of interest. We stress ideas and ways of living because they tend to represent what a creator deeply wants, inside.

• Turns a personal hobby into something a group can belong to

Given the first point, that longing and that idea will usually draw in kindred spirits. It's also why a studio ends up building a reputation, relationships, and a footing. Whatever form the expression takes, what keeps things going in the end is the force of people.

• Cares about more than itself

Here we want to keep some distance from pure consumerism. It's not that these studios don't sell things — it's that you can clearly feel, in how they do what they do, a relatively wide field of vision. They may be looking at the city, at society, or at the scene they belong to. They start from a hobby, but they don't stop at "private expression."

• Wants to break the mold, and actually manages to

Quite a few of the studios listed here have been around for years. Many of them are far from short of peers and competition. But what draws people's eyes to these studios is a certain posture of freedom. Not deliberate contrarianism, but a clear sense of what they want, which is what makes them stand apart.

• Keeps generating ideas

This, too, is an important way they stay alive. Doing it — especially when things aren't going well — is grinding work, and very hard.

• Has to survive somehow, of course, but cares more about what it has made, and why, than about "business models"

We stress this not to place so-called passion outside of capital. Capital — that is, money — is one of the foundations of getting anything done. There's no need at all to be hostile to it. But we're all too familiar with cases where following capital as the only guiding star, in pursuit of maximum profit, leaves something unrecognizable. Maybe these small studios will end up the same way; maybe they lack the business management to keep going. But at least for now they're still making things, and we hope they keep shining.

From the city's point of view, any single small studio's energy is limited, but small studios rising and falling one after another, looking out for each other, sketch out a distinctive urban landscape. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has argued that some of the most precious dwelling places in a culture aren't necessarily things the eye can see. That is, not a specific, identifiable location, building, or landscape, but something expressed through narration, performance, and song — a story, a memory, or some particular meaning. A complete cultural dwelling place, in his view, is a combination of both.

The speed at which China's cities are changing, in those concrete, identifiable things, is plain for everyone to see. In a sense, what small studios do can help sketch out those invisible "dwelling places," and can also help define a city. The city is where detail and possibility find a home; urbanism creates in people a hunger for richness and inclusiveness, and studios — usually the hobby of one person, or a group of people — are the most direct form that hunger takes.

Through this series, QDaily hopes to uncover what makes a city lovable. We ought to look hard for it, and we welcome readers' recommendations of things that shine.

Here are 45 "great little studios"

1. Zhou Art Project

In April 2015, a drunken complaint — "Xiamen is so boring" — from the local Xiamen artist Lin Zhongfei and five Xiamen University students gave birth to Zhou Art: the group's original goal was to curate art exhibitions built around the city of Xiamen. Early works like The Possibility of an Island and Xiamen Meat Company fused local Xiamen life with art exhibitions. Over more than a dozen shows across the following three years, Zhou Art has kept its focus on marginal cities and regions — photographing the abandoned Fujian village of Wugao and mounting an exhibition of the pictures; doing writing residencies in five villages; staging a local theater production in Xiamen's Houtian village. Going forward, Zhou Art hopes to do more "residency works," which fits its original aim of showing what's distinctive about Xiamen.

2. Rooftop Institute

The Fu Tak Building at 365 Hennessy Road in Wan Chai, Hong Kong, is known as a "cultural oasis": inside are countless independent bookstores, galleries, boutique shops, an exhibit of old textbooks, and art studios. In 2015, Law Yuk-mui, who holds a master's in fine arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and her friends stumbled on a spacious rooftop terrace and founded Rooftop Institute, inviting local and Asian artists to make work, do research, and hold discussions on social and cultural questions such as colonialism, borders, migration, foreign labor, and cross-border marriage. As the name suggests, its value lies in a spontaneous, action-driven imagination and practice around public space, community organizing, and art education.

3. Institute for Provocation

A small courtyard house in Beijing's Heizhima Hutong — one courtyard, one narrow, long main room — is where the Institute for Provocation mainly operates. Its five organizers come from different disciplines — contemporary art, architecture, literature, anthropology — and all have experience curating and making cross-disciplinary art. This place has hosted a lecture on "rewriting the history of theater," screened videos about urban change, and curated many exhibitions by young artists. In a recent series of reading events, they've been exploring the relationship between species extinction and humanity.

4. Good Guy Tattoo

Liu Zhenyu, from Wuhan, speaks in a friendly tone, but the tattoos he makes are wild — they look childlike, and a little unhinged. After graduating from the mural painting department of the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, he taught himself tattooing on YouTube, turned to painting on skin, and met a group of equally wild friends along the way. They all wanted to make experimental, inventive "new tattoos." Liu Zhenyu has spent eight years on this: Indiefellas Tattoo in Wuhan, Good Guy Tattoo in Beijing and Shanghai, plus all sorts of exhibitions, exchanges, and performance art built around those two shops, and a self-run media account called Admin Tattoo devoted to interviewing interesting tattoo artists. Whatever name it goes by, it means one thing: making very wild tattoos, and getting more people to know and understand that wildness.

5. Huangbian Station

Almost every artist born in the Pearl River Delta in the 1980s remembers the Fifth Studio of the Oil Painting Department at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Huang Xiaopeng spent eight years turning it into a base for contemporary art education. At the end of 2012, he and the artist Xu Tan founded the nonprofit art organization Huangbian Station in Guangzhou, made up of two parts, Shangyangtai and Huangbian Station — the former fosters connections among various practitioners, the latter is used for exhibitions and presentations. But in the words of one practitioner, Xu Zhenhua, Shangyangtai is more than a space: "It taught me that daily life is actually vast."

6. Li Jianjun x New Youth Group

In 2011, Li Jianjun, no longer content to be only a stage designer, founded his own theater company, New Youth Group. He puts ordinary people on stage to "play" themselves, each telling their everyday story on their own channel, with ordinary audience members choosing whom to listen to. By building this kind of "theater of mortals," Li Jianjun is trying to prove that theater exists to treat the ailments of ordinary people's lives. "I want the audience to be shocked — to see something they've never seen and be set off by it."

7. Zhui Theatre

Zhui Theatre strips away excess drama and romanticization and returns to the most everyday material: parents who lost their only child meeting again a decade later, a daughter who resists her widowed father remarrying, parents who did nothing wrong whose child was bullied. Li Qianpeng, the founder of Zhui Theatre and also a teacher in the acting department at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, faces contemporary emotional questions head-on.

8. Fruity Space

A very lively basement space — warm, low-key, unconventional, a secret base with real DIY spirit that serves cheap mulled wine in winter. It hosts performances, stand-up comedy, small exhibitions, and screenings, with music at its core; it has also run several junk-sale bazaars, and it's keen on psychedelic, experimental, noise, and tone-exploring music, with a mix of young and middle-aged people as its signature. The owner, Lao Zhai, a Beijinger, also runs a label and a band, the Molds; the other owner, Yao Lan, is the guitarist of Second Hand Rose.

9. Music Space

For musicians and music lovers alike, the "live" show is indispensable, but the offline spaces that can hold one have grown ever more expensive and scarce. What sets Music Space apart is that it doesn't just offer an imaginative, independent live venue — it also tries to build new kinds of connections within the industry. This crowdfunded project, launched by Musikid in June 2016, sits in the old warehouse of the north building of the People's Fine Arts Printing Factory; the 390-square-meter space has hosted more than 600 shows so far, making more independent musicians and labels known.

10. Circular Technology Bureau

What's the most important element of music? Acidcreep and Leon think it's authenticity. They believe only what you can touch is real — records, tapes, synthesizers, paint, video, cameras. They have one unshakable principle: every work is a live recording and a live video, pursuing the most extreme expression possible, with both the expression and the emotion generated in the moment. This young Shanghai electronic duo has set itself keywords including independent, electronic, creative, improvised performance. In their own words, they are "a studio that uses real sound, real images, and real ideas to create a unique, real moment in time," working "to fight and strive so that humanity keeps its free will amid all the data."

11. DowntownSwing

Possibly Shanghai's most authentic gathering spot and organization for swing dance. A free-form dance danced to rock music, mixed with jazz, drawing everyone from the young to the middle-aged and elderly. Authentically retro, all about speed, rhythm, and freedom.

12. Nuts Livehouse, Chongqing

Chongqing's oldest livehouse, founded in 2007, a bar and a space for shows and parties in the city's Jiefangbei commercial district. Its founder, Lao Gui, was once the drummer for the Chongqing band Ship of Fools, and started putting on shows in the early 2000s, building the rough shape of Nuts through internet forums and music-charity alliances. Nuts has been an important force shaping Chongqing's independent culture scene, gathering all kinds of people who care about independent culture — "variety" is the one thing they have in common. The photographer shooting a show might be a rapper with GOSH; the bartender might also be a skilled tattoo artist; a young person who's buttoned-up on ordinary days can be a wild punk musician here. These people often write down their stories of drinking and playing at Nuts, and those add up to the "Nuts storytelling sessions."

13. AllGoodMusic

Ten years into their career, the Beijing rap group Itsogoo are known for jazz-soul samples and ethereal, abstract themes. In some sense, the label they founded, AllGoodMusic, can be seen as an extension of their own musical style. Even as the domestic rap environment keeps changing, Itsogoo mostly keep their attention on the music itself and on themselves. Zhou Shijue, a member of Itsogoo, believes the genres of future music don't have to be limited to jazz, but the spirit must be jazz-like — "meaning always improvising, always breaking through, always reflecting the environment we live in."

14. Do Art Space

At 1288 Wuding West Road in Shanghai, the former site of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, part of the space has been converted into Do Art Space. One of its founders, Wang Yulong, was the drummer of the psychedelic band Sui, and was influenced by bands like Sonic Youth and Pink Floyd. Most of the time it looks like an art-teaching space, but every so often it turns into one of Shanghai's most avant-garde music venues. The Xinjiang band Nuoman, Lu Chen of the former Top Floor Circus, and the Japanese band Tenniscoats have all let audiences here hear sounds they'd never come across before.

15. Zhao Dai Club

Called "the hottest venue in the current Beijing underground music scene," it has brought new possibilities to "the incubation of Beijing's club culture." Rather than setting up near the Workers' Stadium or Gulou, Beijing's traditional nightlife districts, it's tucked into the basement of a building in Xinyuanli, because "we don't want everyone who happens to pass by to come in — we want the people who come to really want to be here." Its two hosts: Zhiqi is the mastermind behind the underground electronic party crew ShadowPlay, who has been making music for over a decade and watched Beijing's electronic music scene change after the millennium; Carmen, of mixed Chinese-German heritage, previously worked in music and art in Germany. While organizing events, the two found there was no venue good enough to match the DJs they wanted to invite, so they made their own. They're picky: no photos; they prefer DJs who are sharp, cutting, and know how to tell a story over people who just play popular techno; they only invite musicians they think are worth paying attention to. They're also inclusive: they welcome audiences for all kinds of music, and experiment with LGBT nights, Asian-DJs-only nights, and other themed events. "We love club culture, and we want to create a home for the people gathered behind it — an open space that belongs to this diverse group."

16. Gelato Dal Cuore

A novel, imaginative menu: loquat-paste flavor, Sichuan-pepper-and-pineapple flavor, gazpacho flavor. If you can't decide, you can taste them all one by one — not every ice cream shop offers that. In winter, Dal Cuore also puts out ice cream buns. The shop's decor runs mainly to orange-pink and white; its founder, Zhou Kaihang, used to do marketing and events in the fashion industry, and took ice cream courses at Penn State and in Singapore.

17. Lantos Studio

Food in their eyes seems to have more drama in it. A planet in the universe can also be a chocolate chip; an astronaut leaves footprints in cocoa powder. That's roughly what Lantos Studio's graphic design work looks like — turning food into visual blockbusters. This playful food-creative studio, made up of the husband-and-wife pair Lan1 and Soto, believes that "food is the fulcrum of emotion, memory, and civilization — it is the language of art." Besides their own work, they also collaborate with cultural and creative companies.

18. Gulou Noodles

Lei Jun, the lead singer of Misandao, and his wife wanted their friends to have something to eat when rehearsals and shows ended, so they rented a storefront in Gulou and opened a noodle shop. Lei Jun later died of illness, and his wife, Sister Ma, took over. They believed this small place could become a little base carrying rock culture forward. It has: wave after wave of ordinary yet cool young people have met each other here over bowls of noodles, and Sister Ma has become the chronicler of them and what they do. A city's youth culture has found a home in a bowl of noodles.

19. So Boring, Hong Kong

Contrary to its name, the under-10-square-meter So Boring is hard to find boring, because it has no fixed menu. Seven days a week, a rotating cast — a group of young people plus two collectives, the Tak Cheong Lane Vegetarian Co-op and Woofer Ten — take turns doing the cooking. You can never predict the day's menu: vegetarian food, Japanese home cooking, or a mystery dessert are all possible. That fluidity was originally born of necessity. In 2013, a group of young people passed this vacant storefront on a Yau Ma Tei street corner and suddenly wanted to turn it into Hong Kong's own late-night diner. After they pooled money to set it up, the founding team kept being replaced by newcomers, but the restaurant has survived as a cooperative, keeping the city's vitality alive in a new way.

20. Yeast

A chef, an investor interested in food, and a product designer who cares about artificial intelligence and machines got together to build a "future food lab" — not to invent new foods, but to create companies about food. After research, they design a company's mission and structure, then look for the right people to run it. Every company they imagine has to be able to do one thing: improve people's lives through technology and food. "Taking food seriously" matters a great deal to them. They want to create an initiative around "kitchen intelligence," for instance — hoping to make not gadgets that let people cook fast or even replace them, but tools that spark people's wits and interest in cooking, tools that make people want to "stay in the kitchen."

21. Really Want to Eat

Really Want to Eat was founded in 2014 and tells stories about what ordinary people eat, using food to study who wants to eat what, when, and why. Its founders are Daigua and Li Shanshan. So far they've published four small zines and one photo book, and organized offline events like "Dumpling Building," "Spicy Strips Restaurant," and "Sincere General Store." Their newest series, "Going Home for Chinese New Year," is a brand-new 2019 project.

22. Shitongshe (Food Think)

Shitongshe is a community for knowledge, information, and writing about sustainable food and agriculture; most of its contributors are young people focused on food and farming. Since it was founded on August 26, 2017, it has published 125 original pieces. Starting from a relatively new, small field, they connect ordinary people to the changes of the era: paying attention to the farmers who deserve respect for practicing small-scale, ecologically diverse agriculture; taking the structural ills of food and farm production seriously; asking where our food and our diets come from; following the frontline practitioners, policymakers, and observers of food movements around the world. These young people show a rare degree of self-direction, responding positively to their own lives and to society today through sustained action.

23. Extra Design Studio

Independent magazines, museum brochures, flyers from corner shops — Liu Qianling and Liu Qianli, who studied for years in Europe, are fascinated by these printed things. Print, in their view, can carry more thought and feeling, and can achieve forms of interaction that new media can't. If Extra Design began simply as an attempt to preserve, collect, and exhibit such printed matter, the studio has now started to make printed matter of its own. They design new print formats and turn them into objects using riso printing. Liu Qianling believes the everyday design on show in printed matter better reflects the popular taste of a region.

24. Qinghe United

A visual label founded by the illustrator and toy designer Cazhuxi — rock, fierce, unruly in style, constantly producing collectible toys. "Singing a Different Tune" is another radio program by Cazhuxi, retro and steady, with a spirit of revolutionary romance; it's a sub-column of "West Sea Sound."

25. Meihao Design Studio

Like plenty of graphic design studios, Meihao Design wants to defeat boredom and explore the many possibilities of graphic design. The method it has chosen is risograph printing, used for packaging and books. Riso uses a stencil printing technique, and one of its biggest differences from ordinary printing is that its colors come from overprinting single colors, which produces rich, unexpected color and becomes its main source of expressive power. Because the method is cheap and leaves room for invention, small studios and independent magazines use it often. Meihao Design Studio has worked on a few interesting printed pieces this way. Founded in January 2018, its work includes a magazine, Fan Girl, printed for two French women, about the stories of Chinese aunties, and a photo book, The Emperor's New Clothes, made up of photographs of empty jewelry stands.

26. Lianbang Zouma

Lianbang Zouma has made more than 70 books and countless creative products, sometimes combining the two — a Bob Dylan poetry collection packaged as a bag of potato chips, small Richard Brautigan-style poems you can plant like seeds. The nonsensical name is in fact stolen from an underground Soviet art collective whose slogan was "make money only, don't make art." They also claim to do no market research, which has led three or four people to tinker away at a lot of things that never sold, and also helped open up the domestic market for literary calendars. Its founder, Eniao, born in 1982, describes himself as a rogue (a single one), a villain (of the poetic kind), a Zen practitioner who wants to bring about a new renaissance, whose current passion is building motorcycles — a "bad" thing, just like him.

27. Local

Song Qun and his team, from Xi'an, have kept photographing the city's Soviet-style buildings — documenting them, recording oral accounts of them. Buildings kept being demolished while they shot, so they filmed the demolition too. Small subjects like this are common in their independent publication, Local, which sums up its own stance in one line: organizing images and text related to a city's fabric and its cultural memory, from a folk stance and a folk point of view. They also organize lectures, exhibitions, screenings, and exchanges. Song Qun says that if one issue of the magazine can affect one reader, he's satisfied. What Local contributes is of course much more than that: it documents urban change from a local, humanistic angle that usually gets overlooked.

28. Hole in the Wall

Jinna and Shui, who have drifted through Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Singapore, and other cities, have a sharp sense for the people and things of city life. After they came to Beijing, they used their independent magazine Hole in the Wall to record the old capital as they saw it. From market vendors to independent musicians, they talk to all kinds of people, then sketch their subjects' portraits and bind them into books. Anyone with a different way of living, anyone who doesn't work nine-to-five, fascinates them, and these thin little booklets have become a group portrait of Beijing's people amid rapid change.

29. Paper Wonder Design Store

A convenience store in Xiamen — except it doesn't sell food or daily necessities, it sells design. The pieces are presented in convenience-store format, sitting on shelves. The shop uses Japanese TAKEO paper to build a color-paper system, hanging sheets of colored paper straight onto pegboards on the wall. Walk in and you can treat it as an exhibition — or, of course, just buy something and take it home. Wen Peng is the founder of this project; he digs up interesting designers and artists, brings their work into the store, and also collaborates with them to design new products.

30. abC Art Book Fair

Independent publishing and art book fairs aren't new concepts, but in China this kind of event is still young. These publications emphasize creativity and individuality, with a kind of wild vitality; on display they feel more like a creative bazaar than a traditional trade fair, letting bookstores, institutions, authors, and readers mingle freely. Zhou Yue, founder of DREAMERfty, first launched the "abC Art Book Fair" in early 2015 after finding that people in the scene were scattered all over, and that an exhibition was a good way to bring them together. By last year, after three editions, the fair — whose full name is "art book in China" — had drawn 128 institutions from 16 countries; besides promoting China's homegrown art books and self-published work, it has also built new channels for deeper dialogue with publishers and institutions around the world.

31. Same Paper

When recommending a photographer, Same Paper habitually uses a plain phrase: "like photographer A." An intimate verb, but with the subject dropped, it reads less forceful. This studio, founded in 2013 by the photographer Yuan Xiaopeng and the graphic designer Wang Yijun, is an extension of the global self-publishing culture in Shanghai. It has put out 11 photo books, one magazine, and a bookstore hidden in a longtang, Closing Ceremony, which shut down in 2018 — living up to its name. Fortunately, the number of photographers willing to shoot for them keeps growing.

32. Wuxiang Studio

They always say their "images are slight and their words carry little weight," but what they care about is exactly the precious expression an image contains; they admit that "independent publishing is a journey in the wrong direction," yet still refuse to let digital be the only medium for images, hoping instead that photographs can be bound into books. The studio's daily work is mainly picking good photographs and editing, laying out, and binding them into photo books in a particular way. Besides that, they occasionally hold photo exhibitions and image salons in Wuxi. Their most recent work is the photographer Han Lei's Early Works, black-and-white pictures he took of everyday life in the 1980s and 1990s — a fine-grained record of China in that era. The studio's principal, Ni Liang, is from Wuxi, studied design, and later went to New York to study photography. He used to be a photographer himself, and now spends most of his time on publishing.

33. 427

The person who runs the magazine 427, who also goes by 427, writes without punctuation, a kind of rebellion against the rules. In a conversation with Modern Sky Magazine, he said that running the magazine is for him also a kind of personal resistance, a demand made of his times and his society: the noble, beautiful qualities in the new generation of young people are being killed off by a backward social order, and popular culture and mainstream taste are eroding underground culture more than ever — plus some other things, "but say too much and it's just hot air." There's no special reason he chose a magazine, either: "I just wanted to leave something behind, to make a completely pure youth magazine." Even though, of five issues, only the fifth barely turned a profit, and he "got by entirely on cigarette butts picked up at the bus stop," he did it.

34. Bananafish Books

An independent bookstore on Shiquan Road in Shanghai's Putuo District that also does curating, design and printing, and artist residencies, and offers workshops and print-experience classes to the public. Color, paper, a sense of playfulness, and independence are, roughly, what they care about.

35. Yinwusuo

Yang Mo and Chen Jie, two people born in the 1980s, have brought printmaking — an art form with a history of a thousand years and more — into contemporary daily life. At Yinwusuo, the studio they founded, you can experience the pleasure of hand printing yourself, and if you have paintings, photographs, or other work, they can turn those into prints too. These experiments have made printmaking a special medium: no longer as simple and cheap as mass machine printing, yet able to free a work of art from the constraints of its original medium and let it circulate. In this sense printmaking is no longer an art form trapped inside a museum, but something that truly connects to everyone.

36. Jiazazhi Photobook Library

The country's most established independent photobook publishing studio, devoted to making books and to promoting China's most promising young independent photographers. Its founder, Yan You, is from Ningbo; he was an independent photobook publisher in Beijing early on, and after moving back to his hometown built a two-story, concrete-colored building — the Jiazazhi Photobook Library — housing an exhibition space, a bookstore, and a photobook library.

37. VOLUME PRESS

Nelson Ng, from Singapore, started the publishing studio VOLUME PRESS for a simple reason: he wanted "to let people know that making a book isn't hard at all — anyone can make a book." In 2012 Nelson Ng published his first travel-themed magazine, LOST, and never expected it to be welcomed by the market, let alone shortlisted for the independent-magazine prize "The Stack Award 2017." He went on to launch other themed independent publications, like BROWNIE and Guolou Xiaokan. Even as the print market has been bleak, circulation of VOLUME PRESS's titles has risen against the trend.

38. DailyVinyl

Focused on digging for records, DailyVinyl irregularly puts out a newspaper called Vinyl Daily, distributed free at underground culture spaces across the country and devoted to covering independent music and record culture at home and abroad; they also run secondhand vinyl markets and music parties. The two founders, both based in Shanghai, are serious music lovers and fanatical diggers.

39. Drawing Architecture Studio

Drawing Architecture Studio is run by the designer Hu Yan and the architect Li Han; its work, as the name says, breaks into three parts: "drawing," "building," and "drawing and building as one." Their signature "drawing" works are cityscape pictures, and in these Li Han calls himself a "paper architect," depicting, recording, and interpreting the fast-changing, complicated city from an architect's point of view — they've recorded Sanlitun, 798, Nanluoguxiang, Tuanjiehu, and more. The pictures contain highly detailed street scenes and buildings, but sometimes, to enrich the detail, a building is taken apart or has its roof lifted off, which forms a new way of depicting the city. The "building" work is interior and architectural design, which used to be their main source of income. Recently, though, they've achieved "drawing and building as one," folding painted content into flat spatial design.

40. Beijing Drawing

How should you understand a city? In 2016, Song Zhuangzhuang, an architect by training, and his partner Li Mingyang started running the WeChat official account "Beijing Drawing" in their spare time, describing Beijing in pictures. Sometimes it's a long scroll in the manner of Along the River During the Qingming Festival; sometimes it's a fashionable infographic. Both of them are interested in big cities, because a big city is diverse enough and complex enough, and "can offer far more information than you understand, imagine, or need." A city has the convenience of concentration, and it shows most vividly "the traces left by all kinds of forces — some top-down, some bottom-up." What "Beijing Drawing" does is show these reasonable and unreasonable things quietly, and with a bit of mischief.

41. "Unexpected Chongqing"

Xu Teng, who became known for the "Grandma's Temple" project, and his fellow architecture-trained collaborators Yue Yang and Zeng Yi call themselves "urban detectives." They walk around Chongqing observing, and use hand drawing and modeling to make the space visible again. "Unexpected Chongqing" isn't about giving Chongqing another novelty gaze; it's about what happens when a city grows on its own according to human need. It's bound not to be tidy: you'll find light rail cutting straight through a hole in a high-rise, sewage pipes turned into a base for old men who swim in winter, a Sichuan opera troupe performing nonstop in a garage under the Ciqikou Bridge. All kinds of life growing out of cracks nobody notices, coexisting through hidden rules.

42. "Gao Lu Interest Groups"

After running Ferry Bookstore in Shanghai for ten years, the architect Gao Lu began leading people through books in the form of "paid interest groups." The groups cover a wide range, from 20th-century modern art to psychology. Rather than putting books on the shelf and waiting for people to read them, she wants to pass ways of thinking to others hands-on, extending the bookstore's life with a new model. More than the knowledge itself, Gao Lu cares about how to use knowledge to build the ability to think independently.

43. Jam In

"Jam In" is more like a working group with a specific purpose. Near Chongqing's university district, it is currently a shop selling drinks, independent magazines, and secondhand clothes; it occasionally puts on small exhibitions and regularly screens films. It also does creative design and collaborative parties — it once found an underground dance hall in Chongqing as a venue and held a one-night exhibition called "BYOB" (bring your own beamer, i.e. bring your own projector). The group has no "specific purpose"; what it has instead is a scattering of descriptions. Things like "passively resisting certain things, and fighting for a certain kind of voice, and making the limited radius around us a bit funnier," and creating "relaxed, non-public, temporary dynamic moments that carry minimal obligation but shine brightly for an instant."

44. AIRPARK

On the roof of the Jing'an Design Center on Yuyuan Road there's an open-air space of more than a thousand square meters. Unlike a traditional gym packed with treadmills, ellipticals, and pec decks, AIRPARK is built around parkour, street workout, CrossFit, and other activities, making the city's landscape part of exercise. After bringing bazaars, competitions, and offline parties into the space, its founder, Yang Qibin, wanted to prove that fitness can be a less rigid, more relaxed way of living.

45. Anfu Hall

An underground living room run by the married couple Li Xiaoyu and Runqiu, in a basement on Anfu Road, in the heart of Shanghai's former French Concession, covering 250 square meters. The physical space's biggest feature is a steady, high-volume output of creative work — mysterious yet down-to-earth, feeding young people a constant supply of nourishment through formats including but not limited to exhibitions, band shows, radio, photo shoots, chat sessions, movie nights, and dress-up games, while also offering rentals and a host-crowdfunding program.

Cover image from Unsplash