MCLC: Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia

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Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia
Dear Colleagues,
I am writing to announce the publication of the facsimile and translation of the Chinese editor, curator, and activist Ou Ning's notebook Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia.
Best regards,
Mai Corlin <maicorlin at gmail.com>
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia is a graphic montage piece, where comments, thoughts and short accounts from Ou Ning’s travels to Bishan are intertwined with drawings, clippings, color-coded text, handwritten notes, pictures and quotes. The forefathers of the utopian community, pictured side by side in a pantheón, are the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) and one of the Chinese leaders of the historical Rural Reconstruction Movement, James Yen (1890-1990).
Ou Ning’s goal with the Bishan Commune utopia is to realize the idea of an autonomous zone, where experiments with co-living, sharing, anarchism, community, self-organization, architecture, art practices, and rural traditions can take place, however difficult this might prove in present-day China.
The publication consists of two books: the first volume contains a facsimile of Ou Ning’s original notebook in full color; the second volume is a translation of the notebook from the Chinese by Mai Corlin and Austin Woerner also including an interview with Ou Ning not previously published in English as well as Ou Ning’s 2012 text “Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik,” which lays out Ou Ning’s understanding of ongoing anarchist practices in a totalitarian, capitalist reality.
Ou Ning was born in rural Guangdong province in 1969. His practice covers a wide range of projects straddling the fields of art and politics. As a filmmaker, he directed the documentary Meishi Street (2006) concerning local acts of resistance against the demolition of an area in a central part of Beijing in relation to the 2008 Olympics. As curator he has headed the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, and from 2011 to 2013 he was chief editor of the literary bi-monthly Chutzpah!, a magazine that has dealt in-depth with issues such as agrarian communities in East Asia, revolution, queer literature and George Bataille. And these are just a few of Ou Ning’s undertakings.
Read Mai Corlin's introduction here.
The publication can be purchased from OVO press' webshop: http://ovopress.tictail.com/product/ou-ning-bishan-commune
June 2015, English/Chinese
135x210 mm, 120+48 pages
full color+black/white
smyth sewn, perfect bound
Co-published with Antipyrine
ISBN 978-87-93108-36-3
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 24, 2015
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