Ou Ning’s cultural practices encompass multiple disciplines. As an editor and graphic designer, Ou Ning is perhaps best known for his seminal book New Sound of Beijing (1999), which helped define the capital’s emerging rock scene. As a curator, he initiated the Get It Louder exhibition which tours in the major cities of China every two years. He’s also the commissioned curator of the sound art section in China Power Station, an exhibition presented by the Serpentine Gallery at London’s legendary Battersea Power Station and then travelled to Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo and MUDAM, Luxembourg. As an artist, Ou is known for his involvement in urban research and his archive and documentation projects such as San Yuan Li (participant of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003) and Da Zha Lan, commissioned by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. He is a frequent contributor of various magazines, books and exhibition catalogues and has lectured around the world. In the late 1990s, he founded U-thèque, an independent film and video society. Later, he launched Alternative Archive, a platform for alternative cultural activities. He joins the jury of the Benesse Prize at the 53rd Venice Biennale this year. He’s currently based in Beijing, China and is the Director of Shao Foundation.

Beatrice Galilee was born in London and trained as an architect in Bath. After graduating, she studied journalism and wrote for several music and fashion magazines before taking up an MA in Architectural History at the Bartlett school, UCL. She worked for two years as architecture editor of Icon, an influential archi tecture and des ign magaz ine where she interviewed some of the world’s most important figures, promoted the work of new young practices and won the Architecture Journalist of the Year award in 2008. She has sat on a number of juries and contributes to several international architecture and design titles, national newspapers and several books on contemporary architecture. She is now based in Beijing.

After finishing international law studies in Tokyo, Kayoko Ota became assistant to Kisho Kurokawa for organizing exhibitions and international conferences. In 1987 she set up an office for cultural and educational programs on architecture and urban issues in Tokyo with Akira Suzuki, where they launched Telescope magazine and organized summer schools with the AA School of Architecture in London. Ten years later, she became independent to work on exhibitions and publications in Tokyo. In 2002 she moved to Rotterdam to join AMO, a creative thinktank of Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Starting with Content, a major retrospective exhibition of OMA and AMO, she has worked on Prada’s Waist Down and The Gulf exhibitions, while editing Post-Occupancy with Rem Koolhaas. Meanwhile, she was on the editorial board of Domus magazine in Milan for three years from 2005. Since 2008 she is based in Tokyo and Rotterdam.

Born in Beijing and a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Shannon lives and works in Beijing and New York. She is the co-founder and executive director of People’s Architecture and ArcXchange. In 2006, she assembled an international network of scholars, architects and urban planners for a nine-part monthly lecture series entitled 3 x 3: A Perspective on China at the American Institute of Architects’ Center for Architecture. Shannon organized Building Asia Brick by Brick which exhibited in China and U.S., teaching children about architecture and design, served as curatorial advisor for China Constructs: New Visions of Domestic Architecture at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and curated Building China: Five Projects | Five Stories , an architecture exhibition at the Center for Architecture in New York City in 2008. Currently, she is co-organizing Designed in China , an open Chinese competition, and STEP 1 exhibition.

Pauline J. Yao is an independent curator and scholar based in Beijing and San Francisco. Born in the U.S., she came to China in the early 1990s to study Chinese and then returned to the States and received her M.A. degree in East Asian Studies and Art History at the University of Chicago. For five years she worked as Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco during which time she curated exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, published her writings in various magazines, catalogues and journal, taught courses in the Graduate Program at the California College of the Arts, and frequently traveled to China for independent research. In 2006 she received a Fulbright Grant and relocated to Beijing. In 2007 she received the inaugural CCAA Art Critic Award and subsequently published In Production Mode: Contemporary Art in China (2008). She has curated programs and exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum, The Luggage Store Gallery, Universal Studios Beijing and the Gallery at REDCAT and sits on the editorial board of Yishu Art Journal and Contemporary Art and Investment magazine. In 2008 she co-founded Arrow Factory, a storefront art space in Beijing.

Ya-Zhu Xu, Born in Taipei,based in Taipei and Beijing,Culture activist,artist,trans-disciplined worker in contemporary art and underground art domain , She is responsible of projects such as “inter-sound” and “My room is the lab“ ,Curator of “Taipei electronic arts phenomena 2002″、“Inter-Sound,between Taiwan strait”、“Dashazi International Art Festival“ (2006)、Life/Live exposition in Cité internationale des arts Paris、co-organizer of “2008 Mini Midi －Inter-Sound” ,and many other culture exchange project between the strait. As an artist her works had been exposed in Taipei fine art museum (2006)、”Get it Louder”(2007).Xu is working on the edition of “Chinese sound art scape” an up-dated collection of Chinese sound art works. Difficult to be categorized,she once defined her own career as “culture activator”.