Celebrate 5 Years of Vice China w/ LA's Low End Theory Crew and Teebs Free Show, Jan 12

My first experience of Vice was similar to many a British student's back in the late noughties; you'd grab a free copy on the way out of the pub and it would naturally find its way onto your bathroom floor, to mingle among the other detritus of student life and occasionally be picked up during more prolonged visits.

What Vice did well back then was to corner the market of skuzzy, middle-class late-teens who were just starting to explore the world for themselves and hold up a safe but cutting mirror up to their lives. To take it one step further, they'd also add tales that allowed you to live vicariously through other people's mis- or downright gross adventures with a bucketload of seminal experimentation, hinted-at drug use, and some artistic boob thrown in for good measure.

Whereas Vice in the West marches on with its snide social commentary and praiseworthy war reportage, its coverage in China is a mixture of documentary filmmaking, translated copy, and the same edgy content that I grew up with, drawing millennials in with a sense of belonging to a cooler-than-average subculture.

Now celebrating five years in the business, Vice China's creative cultural company 异视异色 (yì shì yì sè, YSYS for short), which holds and operates its sister brands Noisey, Creators, and i-D, prepares for their official YSYS Year-End Party on Friday, Jan 12 at 798's M Woods gallery, a sizeable downsize from their prior Tango 3/F-based shindigs (but likely no less packed). Previous years have been notable for bringing over some great names, including Michael Rother of Neu! fame in 2014 and LA's Soulection crew in 2015. This year is no different, bagging another lot of LA's primo producers in the form of Low End Theory's resident DJs, hosts of a weekly experimental and hip-hop night at Lincoln Height's The Airliner club, as well as Brainfeeder mainstay Teebs (pictured at top). Visuals will be provided by the Brooklyn and Beijing-based Hibanana studio.

Below we caught up with Mo Luan, director of marketing and communications at Vice China, about how the past year has been for them as well as what we can expect come Friday.

How did you guys come into contact with Low End Theory and ask them to play in Beijing/Shanghai?
We knew Daddy Kev, a Grammy-nominated mixer, also the founder of Low End Theory. We’ve also been following these guys for quite some time and they’re doing amazingly back in LA and we thought why not bring them to China, so we reached out and they agreed. It was great!

Previous Vice end-of-year parties have been quite visually stimulating, a carryover from what the brand achieves via their online platforms. What can we expect at this year’s party?
To be frank, I think this year’s event is likely our most visually provocative year-end event. We chose the venue and the time for a reason, and I think the audience will see that when they arrive. I don’t want to say what you can expect from the party, but we’re definitely expecting lots of different reactions from you guys. 

Compared to holding the show at a large venue like Tango, where your year-end parties usually take place, what are the benefits (or downsides) of choosing M Woods in 798 this year?
Well, we’ve been doing this for five years now, we ought to mix it up once in a while and keep things interesting, even if it’s just for ourselves! The idea for this year’s event is to create a new experience in a different atmosphere, integrating new elements into it, and M Woods is a nice option that allows us to do that. The audience will definitely get music, but there will also be art, interactive elements, and spaces to engage and inspire interesting conversations and ideas. Lastly, yes we’ll have to do a good job with crowd control. 

In your opinion, how has it been to reformat and align the Vice brand for a Chinese audience? What are some of the difficulties that have arisen from highlighting more edgy content in China?
It’s been an interesting experience for us to bring all the brands into China, namely Vice, Noisey, Creators, and more recently, i-D. These brands that identify as “edgy” became mainstream in the West around early 2000, and millennials grew up with them. However, in China, the target audience grew up with a very different social, economic, and cultural background, and what they identify with isn’t the same as what people identify with in the West, so it wasn’t cutting it to only provide content that’s been produced for a Western audience. It was important for us to develop locally relevant content that resonated with the audience here at home, and we will definitely continue to do more of that in the future. 

What were some of Vice China’s most memorable moments in 2017?
2017 was a crucial year for us. From a marketing perspective, we grew the most over the past year, and also produced the highest amount of local content in all five years combined since we launched in China in 2012. We also moved office into a much bigger space, which was quite exciting for everyone. Other than that, we have something new that’s currently cooking, which we’re planning to launch this year, so please stay tuned! 

And finally, what do you hope to achieve in 2018?
In addition to growing all the brands under YSYS, one of the most important goals we have for 2018 is to keep things interesting and to continuously improve, and this goes for the content we create, the events we organize, and the people we collaborate with. This way we will hopefully also be able to give you guys something interesting to talk about. 

Attendance for the Jan 12 Vice China Year-End Party at M Woods is free but you must register in advance (scan the QR code in the poster here and follow the instructions). We've heard that there's a capacity of 300 at the venue so you better get there early if you want in.

Images: hvw8.com, dailybruin.com, courtesy of Vice China