Matthew Niederhauser
Sound Kapital and Visions of Modernity Lecture
Wednesday October 28 @ 6:30 PM
Parsons The New School for Design, Art, Media, and Technology
2 West 13th St. 10th Floor Lab, New York, NY 10011

A new wave of Chinese musicians is taking Beijing by storm. Revolving around four venues spread across the city, this burgeoning group of performers are working outside government‐controlled media channels, and in the process, capturing the attention of the international music community. They now constitute a fresh, independent voice in a country renowned for creative conformity and saccharine Cantonese pop. In Sound Kapital, photographer Matthew Niederhauser captures the energy of the performers involved in this innovative orgy gripping Beijing’s music underground.

After living in China for eleven months in 2000, Matthew Niederhauser began his studies at Columbia University where he immersed himself in the anthropology department and drew strongly from his first‐hand experience with Chinese culture. This led to many more trips across Asia and thesis research on urban development and the role of cultural tourism in integrating rural communities into central economic systems in western Tibet. After graduating from college in 2006, he split time between researching for the National Committee on US‐China Relations and assistant teaching at the International Center of Photography before heading back to Beijing to begin his career as a full-time documentarian and photojournalist. Since then Matthew’s work covering youth culture and urban development in China has appeared in the New Yorker, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, Photo District News and the Guardian Observer amongst others.