MANIFESTO

CHINABOT

What? 

Chinabot is a platform and collective created to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music. 

In 2017, a digital diaspora community, a multi-disciplinary label and network of Asian artists decided to cooperate on a new way to collect and promote exciting Asian music.

We want to show a slice of what we like, the cultures we come from and our own ideas. We’re an online community and a virtual home celebrating the music that falls between the gaps -- a place for adventurous listening.

Chinabot is positioned at the junction point between the influence of Asian music on contemporary sounds and the development of experimentation. We work with composers, sound artists, improvisers and musicians to develop projects that rearrange the furniture of the musical world. We want to question our assumptions about what music is and where it can go. 

Why?
 

People are often fed a singular image of ‘Asian music’, but each of our cultures is varied and complex.

Even in 2017, realistic portrayals of Asians are still thin on the ground in the West, throughout cinema, television, literature, music and theatre too. We are smothered by the stereotype of the uncreative, robotic worker, and labeled as ‘Chinese’ no matter where in the continent we are from.

By continuing the dehumanization of Asians onscreen and in popular culture, it dehumanizes us in real life. 

Racism against Asians is not only ignored, but often accepted, unacknowledged or even encouraged. We want to break silences, which are often also encouraged our own culture, in order to push the public to take a closer look at racial inequality towards Asians.

In the most literal sense: we want to make a new stereo-type.

People have always moved around the world, bringing their traditions, knowledge, and beliefs with them, and often mixing them with those of their new homes. For many people, their migrations and those of their ancestors are important in shaping both their personal identities and the art they produce. 

Chinabot is a space for Asian artists to play with their ideas and cultural hybridities. By doing so we hope to create another narrative in contemporary music from Asia and its diaspora.