The group of researchers and artists is finally back from Xin Jiang with pictures and a film which are editing at the moment. In Xinjiang, almost any unofficial religious activities are forbidden now, which makes it very hard to record authentic religious rituals. However, they did film and record some dervish and buwi (female religious singer and dancer), which blend Islamic and Shamanistic elements and make excellent materials for a film and CD recording. To protect the identity of the performers the pictures attached won’t show their faces.

“The Disappearing Shamans” is a project to document the disappearing traditions of Shamanism in different regions of China and to question their meanings from contemporary perspectives by a group of artists in the fields of visual arts and music. The project will help us to not only know more about our ancestors’ religion, arts and philosophy, but also ponder on the relationship between Man and Nature, as well as Man’s ultimate destination.

The project will be divided into three phases, in regard to the Shamanistic traditions in Northwestern, Northeastern, and Southwestern China respectively.

The first phase already started! Mu Qian together with the following group of people set off for Xinjiang on Decmber 26. The first travel will be lasting a month.

The team of the project will consist of four persons: conceiver/researcher Mu Qian, filmmaker Yang Wenliang, visual artist Li Peifeng and musician/recording engineer Song Yuzhe. In the first phase, the team will spend 20 days driving throughout Xinjiang to interview and document Shamans and Shamanistic rituals of the Uygur, Kazakh, Tajik and Xibe peoples. Then members will go back to their cities of residence to create works with the materials they get from the trip.

Senior culture and arts writer. Works include articles about lives of Catholic Tibetans(China Journalism Awards, Second Prize, August 2007), and Chinese Muslims’ haj pilgrimage(China Journalism Awards, Third Prize, July 2008).

Co-founder and Director of Pentatonic Workshop(www.pentatonicworkshop.org), an independent NPO working in the areas of art, culture, education, and community. Accomplishments include producing over 10 programs of folk music and dance, such as “Kazakh Diaspora Tales” and “Soul of Dolan”. Master of Arts, Ethnomusicology. China Conservatory of Music. June 2005. Beijing, China. Translated Alan P. Merriam’s Anthropology of Music and co-translated Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History (edited by Stephen Blum) into Chinese.

Independent documentary filmmaker focusing on endangered folk cultures. Has traveled extensively in China’s remote areas and shot over 1,000 hours of documentary films about folklore, religion, ethnic culture and traditional music, including recent films about Shamanistic rituals in Shaanxi and Sufi Muslims’ rituals in Xinjiang. Films about Northern Shaanxi Province singer Wang Xiangrong and a private art school in Inner Mongolia were aired on the CCTV. Co-founder of “folksongs”, one of the most influential websites about Chinese folk music with over 1,500 registered members. Special curator of China Record Company. Works include serial CDs of masters of traditional Chinese folk songs like Wang Xiangrong, Zhu Zhonglu and Zhagdasrong. Member of the Traditional Music Society of China.

Free visual artist. Director of Fairytale, the documentary film part of Ai Weiwei’s work of the same title, which was featured at the Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, 2007. Video works include “Ink·Smoke”(in collaboration with Taiwan artist Cindy Ng Sio Ieng), “Farm to Factory” (in collaboration with Chen Mu) and“Economic Growth”(in collaboration with Xue Liming).

Since 2004, Li has been focusing on the humanistic and social conditions of Northwestern China, where he is originally from. His latest works, Silver Age(about a town in Gansu Province called Baiyin or “Silver”)and Qinqiang Opera(about the destiny of a traditional opera popular in Northwestern China), will participate the Yamagata International Documentary film Festival in Japan and Cinéma du Réel International Film Festival in France in 2009.

Song Yuzhe, musician/recording engineer

From 1998 to 2002, Song was the soul person of the “Wood Pushing Melon”(木推瓜), one of China’s most acclaimed alternative rock bands. Works include CD albums Wood Pushing Melon, and Ma Music. After “Wood Pushing Melon” disbanded in 2002, Song has been making two series of musical works: Huang Qiang(荒腔)，theme albums of creative editing and mixing of the music and ambient sounds that he recorded in China’s minority areas(for example, The Mandala’s Mandolin, an album of mandolin music in Tibet); and Zou Ban(走板), his own rendition of traditional folk ballads with new arrangement. At the same time, Song collaborates with avant-garde folk musician Xiao He to compose Two Big Men, a work that blends folk music and theater. As a recording engineer and sound designer, his works include The Music of China’s Kazakhs and Kyrgyz(an audio documentary commissioned by eurasianet.org), Wen Pulin’s films Looking for Wogyan Beylung(《寻找乌金贝隆》) and Shoba Lhamo(《雪巴拉姆》), Zhang Yuedong’s Midafternoon Barks(《下午狗叫》), TV5 France’s Nanjing, and Olivier Meys’s quatre saisons sous la terre.