BAO is a curatorial, design and editorial office originally founded in Beijing in 2006 by Beatrice LEANZA (curator and critic) and Naihan LI (designer and architect).
Acting by way of an international network of partners and collaborators, BAO’s projects foster new encounters and transversal research among the visual arts, design and architecture with a particular explorative focus on contemporary Asia. BAO is a unique China-based think-tank for the interdisciplinary investigation, both theoretical and practice-based, of alternative and critical formats of communication and spatial occupation in the urban territory.
Rooted in the heart of East Asia, BAO explores "cultural making" from the locality of China, while exposing the possibilities of alternative intellectual programs and transformative gestures purported by its socio-political diversity. BAO approaches the localized dynamics of private and public unsettlement, engaging in a research-based practice to rethink existing creative formats and develop new ones to improve transnational dialogue between the politics of industry and human studies.
BAO has been established in a moment of radical changes when global economics and cultural capitalism increasingly are exposed to the organizational modes of network societies and hybrid mobile communities. It responds in essence to the reality of contemporary innovation intended as a form of collective, process-based work entailed by specialized micro-enterprises connected beyond the geographical borders and governmentalities of given environments.
BAO is a research office that utilizes the three modes of curatorial, editorial and design organization to translate the possibilities of multidisciplinary production into process and creation. Operating within diverse knowledge areas (visual arts, architecture and design, moving images, media studies, fashion and publishing) the studio entails the development of new conceptual mainstays for systemic partnerships between private, public and corporate agencies.
Conceived in a flexibly operating network, BAO's team functions as a catalyst for ideas originating from disconnected creative communities and engages them in a site/subject-specific economics from conceptualization to realization. In the acknowledgement of the increasing fragmentation adjusting social change to a fast and non-durable mass-consumption of cultural products, BAO works as an all-encompassing unit both self-initiating and customizing from small to large scale interventions to impact the public realm. BAO acts as a think-bridge supplementing clients' programs by interrogating artistic vision, architectural thinking and textual communication into integrated projects for innovation.
Grounded in divergent but complementary disciplinary and geopolitical articulations, BAO is a roundly partnership that operates through communication and cross-border collaboration with a variety of local and international cultural players and professionals, institutions and creative agencies.
BAO operates as an open-source structure able to accommodate unrelated methodologies of research and practice, targeting new subjectivities and identifying social groups as pre-empted by the "utility-driven logic" characterizing the global urban condition.
