#readcon

I know it's a bit late to announce this, but I'll turning up in my first Convention debut, ReadCon! I'll be selling prints and provide sketch commissions  though out the day.

I never brought this up earlier on, because I was knuckling down in getting these prints prepared for the past couple of week.

Now everything is done and all that needs to be done is the last stages of preparation.

I'm super excited about this! If your attending to the con? Be sure to look out for me!

Another year gone! To celebrate our 2nd time at readcon and our 3rd birthday on the 7th July we're hosting a lucky dip!

It's free to enter! Simple reblog this post if you'd like a chance to win some free swag. Swag includes prints, stickers, keychains and more! Pics will be uploaded shortly! Reblog this post for a chance to be picked! The more you reblog, the higher the chance of winning! There's no limit to the amount of reblogs :) Make sure to tag #Hungry Whispers in it somewhere so that we can follow it on public feed!

tl;dr: the more you reblog/spam about us, the more chances you get of winning!

In other news, we've been busy making a Renpy version to test drive the new script that we've been working on, hence it has been a little quiet down our end.  Once that is done and we're more comfortable with working together we're aiming to do a Unity version to test out some new ideas and see where that takes us!

ReadCon: What have you been up to since ReadCon 2013?

Christine Ni: Where do I start? Well, on the Chinese culture side, apart from keeping the new website full of new content, I’ve tried to get out to as many smaller events as possible, with my panels and talks, including CamCon, and a few events at London galleries. I also had the pleasure of mixing my love of books, with my love of geekery, editing the 2014 con book for Kitacon Invasion. I really enjoyed the project, mainly because of the fantastic range of content, from great illustrations to articles on Shinto, the Kita community and of course the F.A.T.E. project, which I had been invited back for the finale, reprising my role as the deadly Lady Title!

Away from conventions, I have helped set up a charity, aiming to bring together Chinese people in the UK, and promote British Chinese cultural exchange. The Chinese Gateway Community, I hope, will be a comprehensive information source, where people could go and find all the China related events happening in the country. They’ve just finished setting up their new website, which allows different organisations to post their events up there. I feel that this is the start of something very promising.

RC: Your panel last year was on the classic work of Chinese literature “Journey to the West”  and the countless works that take inspiration from it; which is your favourite “Journey to the West” adaption?

CN: That is a very difficult question. There have been so many brilliant adaptations and reinterpretations since the novel was written hundreds of years ago. I love the original 1986 Chinese TV series I grew up with, and that will probably always be the definitive one to me, but I find the gun-toting anti-heroes in Kazuya Minekura’s 1990s manga adaptation Saiyuki Reloaded super cool. I am really impressed with how well the fantasy and pan-Asian elements are brought out in the new 2011 Chinese TV series.

Dragon Ball is also very important to me. There’s a wonderful mix, with everything I could possibly want in a comic, action, sci-fi, comedy, robots, ancient Chinese elements, strong female characters, all growing out of this important classical text. It’s such a strange, yet understandable reinterpretation of the Buddhist idea of benevolence via the characterization of Goku.

  RC: What areas of Chinese history and culture are you particularly interested in?

CN: My favourite historical periods are always those that produced great literature. The Yuan & Ming eras, 13th to 17th century, reaped the benefits of both the invention of mass printing and ripening of literary movements that had developed through centuries of gradual urbanisation of society and rise of popular entertainment, such as the play and the novel. But there’s been this very long pattern of upheaval and creativity running through China’s magnificent history. After a century of political upheaval, China is finally under a certain level of stability again, giving it room to develop its modern home-grown culture. This is very important for a country that has lost much of its traditional heritage and has had to borrow a lot of Western modernity. The 80s was when China gained its current political and economic freedom, and after a couple of decades of emulating artists of other countries, outputting works that deal with recent painful history, Chinese popular and sub cultures are taking off, right now, from the manhua (Chinese for comics), to Chinese steampunk, which is giving the Wuxia (kungfu fantasy) films a new energy and edge, to sci-fi, a very new genre to China, though some short stories did win the Hugo Nebula Award recently. So yes, a really exciting time at the moment.

  RC: What are you working on at the moment?

CN: Right now, I’m working on Shaw Sisters: The Fighting Women of Hong Kong Cinema, which is of course, going to premier at ReadCon 2014. Shaw Brothers films had such a huge influence on subsequent Chinese as well as Western cinema, yet the West mainly knows it for its hard-edged, male dominated kungfu movies. There’s so much more to Shaw. If I let myself, I’d talk for hours on the subject, but I won’t say too much about it now… spoilers…..

I’m also just putting the final touches on a documentary I’m helping to translate, working with the Chicago music journalist John Yingling, who travelled across China, attending gigs, discovering underground bands, soaking up the indie scene. It was a joy to translate the interviews, and I’m going to be editing the rough cut later this month. I’ve just got permission to put a tiny snippet of it on my website. I can’t wait to see the finished thing.

  What are you looking forward to at ReadCon 2014?

CN: I’m looking forward to sharing my panel with ReadCon otaku, really looking forward to seeing the fantastic cosplays, and seeing how you all build on the fantastic event you did last time. Things like your Slender game was awesome, and really made use of the space. I also loved meeting the indie artists in the dealers room and, well, just chatting to the con attendees and fellow guests! I ended up talking to a group about Arthurian Legends and Tir Na Nog, comparing them to Three Kingdoms, and Chinese mythology. It’s a subject I really look forward to returning to. Maybe as another talk, or event