Byron is the Beijing Editor for superfuture, is the Director of a viral marketing/PR/events shop called cottonrazorblade, is part of an industrial design collective called Chinatown, and manages to find time to paint, design, and do installations! He'll be contributing regular pieces to this.hearts.on.fire. giving you all the lowdown on what's up in China.

Not surprisingly, few people are aware of what’s going on out here, but China's holding its own, across a variety of mediums usually assumed to be largely represented only in the West. Everyone knows that the contemporary art scene here is dangerously close to the breaking point, but the truth is that the underground here is representing lovely in everything from dance, design, architecture, fashion, graffiti, music and so on.

1. Waza / Waza is a collective of young artists from Wuhan that have been experimenting with all manners of technological mediums. Their first major exhibition last year at the Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, featured Kuya, a so-called convergent media piece recently selected for the 2008 Rotterdam Film Festival, SV, a series of images derived from sound, and Chi, an animated film broken down into chapters and 'hacked' into a series of PSPs strewn throughout the gallery. The show was meant as their "intransigent declaration of war on 'trite' art", which unfortunately has all too great a meaning here in the contemporary Chinese art world, where collectors are running rampant and some galleries have become little more than 'art convenience stores' (translates better in Mandarin). As well as having multiple shows coming up in the next two months they are finishing up work on Vegas, a 50+ minute film shot in a type of stop motion, with tens of thousands of photographs being individually Photoshopped and then edited together at 50 frames per second.

2. DJ Wordy / DJ Wordy has been a legend in underground hip hop circles in Beijing for years, and after winning the Chinese DMC Championships 3 consecutive years is finally starting to get his due on the international stage. Checkout this video of Wordy in action! He battled Qbert here in December at China Doll (see video here) and impressed so much that Qbert is looking to take him on tour stateside. He’s doing a new series of events called Hotpot and has a mix out to give a taste of the style of music he’s working with. Stay tuned for more...