The main concerns of SIMA now include art as social media, social media as art, integration between cultural/critical theory and art practice, and practical integration between curatorship and art making. The Curatorship section is worth noting, because that is where Gao Shiming, the Executive Director of SIMA, is from, and it shows the new structure’s strong emphasis on curatorial and cultural theory studies. It is in fact a merger of three former departments: New Media Art, Mixed Media Art, and Curatorship. The new School of Intermedia Art (SIMA) is the result. Yao Dajuin: The insider scoop is that China Academy of Art really wants to strengthen its structural focus on “contemporary art,” outside of the traditional divisioning of Traditional Chinese Painting, Oil Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture, and New Media Art. Robin Peckham: To begin with, could you tell us a bit about the philosophical shift, if any, behind this transition from the New Media Art Department to the School of Intermedia Art, and how it might affect your own pedagogical practice? Does the merger with several other departments change the composition of majors and focuses of students you will be instructing? What follows is his own speculative take on China, sound, media, and the educational nexus of these phenomena. It is this last epithet in which I am currently interested: as something of a wild card embedded within what was once a rather conservative institution offering a doctorate in calligraphy, Yao Dajuin has already made his mark not only through his own work but also through a handful of emerging artists under his tutelage.Īs he shifts this year into a new role at the innovative School of Intermedia Art, formed in the fall of 2010, I tried to find out exactly what we have to look forward to in the years to come. from University of California at Berkeley), poet (interested particularly in concrete poetry in new media), typographer (and pioneer in the application of vertical Chinese), curator (of a wide range of sound and media exhibitions around China), and educator. His name is typically followed by a seemingly endless deluge of titles and roles: sound artist (and founder of the influential China Sound Unit, recently succeeded by Hangzhou Sound Unit), DJ (on his own Fore Taste Radio, among other venues), musician (and now publisher of the already influential Post-Concrete Records), art historian (with a Ph.D. Yao Dajuin, currently based in Hangzhou where he teaches at the China Academy of Art, is an artist and thinker rather anomalous within the Chinese media scene for his intellectual and historical approach to contemporary cultural material. Education Electronic Music Interviews Digimag - Issue 62, March 2011

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