About Tiannan

Tiannan

Overview

Tiannan, known in English as Chutzpah!, was a bilingual literary magazine published in Guangzhou, China, in its celebrated modern form between 2011 and 2014. Launched on 1 April 2011 by Modern Media Group with the curator, writer and rural-reconstruction advocate Ou Ning as editor-in-chief, it was a self-consciously cosmopolitan magazine of new Chinese writing — fiction, poetry, essays and translation — organised around themes such as the rural-urban divide, dialect and minority literatures, diaspora and youth. Each issue included an abridged English-language supplement of translations from the Chinese, edited under the Peregrine banner by Austin Woerner, which made Chutzpah! one of the very few mainland literary magazines directly legible to international readers. Over a print run of sixteen issues it earned enthusiastic reviews from lovers of literature for its presentation and adventurous selection of content, attracted international attention as an independent-minded literary title, and then ceased publication in February 2014 under business pressure. The title had a longer history — Tiannan had been founded in 1982 as a folk-literature publication — but it is the Ou Ning era, profiled here in the past tense, that made the magazine famous.

A Title with an Earlier Life, 1982–2010

The magazine Ou Ning relaunched in 2011 was not new. Tiannan had originally been founded in 1982 by the Guangdong Provincial Folk Artists Association as a folk-literature publication — a provincial journal of the kind that recorded folk songs, stories and local traditions. In 2005 it was purchased by the Modern Media Group (Modern Media, the publisher of Modern Weekly and other Guangzhou-based titles) and changed into a book-review magazine named Modern Book Reviews, but, in the reference account's blunt summary, it did not make it, and its publishing licence lay idle for five years. That dormant licence is the key to the magazine's rebirth: publishing licences are scarce and closely regulated in China, and a group holding an unused literary licence possessed the legal shell within which a new magazine could be created. When Modern Media decided to revive the title with Ou Ning as editor-in-chief, Tiannan acquired its second life — and a new English name, Chutzpah!, from the Hebrew and Yiddish word for audacity, adopted from 2011. The name announced the programme: nerve, cheek and literary ambition, in a magazine whose Chinese title, meaning South of Heaven, pointed the other way, toward the land and its traditions.

The Relaunch of 1 April 2011

On 1 April 2011, with Ou Ning as editor-in-chief, the magazine was officially published and launched. The theme of the relaunch issue was The Hometown of Asia, and it focused on the history and reality of rural areas in Asia and on the wave of social movements involving intellectuals in rural construction. The choice was characteristic of its editor. Ou Ning, born in Suixi in Guangdong province, was by 2011 a prominent figure across Chinese art, design and publishing: he had edited work on the Beijing rock scene, initiated the Get It Louder exhibition biennales of 2005, 2007 and 2010, curated for the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, and was in that same year founding the Bishan Commune rural-reconstruction project in Bishan village, Anhui. A literary magazine edited by such a figure was never going to be a conventional journal of new fiction. Chutzpah! treated literature as part of a wider inquiry into how China was changing — cities against countryside, standard language against dialects, the centre against the country's geographical and cultural fringes — and its founding issue's rural Asia theme set that agenda from the first page.

What Chutzpah! Published

Across its sixteen issues, Chutzpah! published new Chinese writing of unusual range. Its subjects, as one of its editor's own curriculum summaries lists them, ranged from dialect literature to minority literature, poetry, diaspora, and a final sequence on the Diamond Generation of post-1989 youth. It devoted a whole issue to Uyghur and Kazakh writing — described by the Guardian's books coverage as a first for any Chinese literary magazine — bringing literature from Xinjiang, in Han translation, to a national literary readership. Its second issue carried an in-depth history of Chinese science fiction, Some of Us Are Looking at the Stars, compiled by Kun Kun, with translations of Han Song, Fei Dao, Chen Qiufan and Yang Ping into English alongside translations of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Paolo Bacigalupi and Jeff Noon into Chinese — a perfect emblem of the magazine's two-way, fringe-focused traffic. Contemporary commentary noticed the pattern: Chinese fiction, the Guardian observed, was focusing on the fringes of both map and mind, and it pointed to Chutzpah! as evidence. Each issue also carried the abridged English supplement of translations from the Chinese, making the fringe visible abroad as well as at home.

The Bilingual Experiment and Peregrine

The English supplement was integral, not decorative. Chutzpah! was a bilingual literary magazine: its Chinese contents were matched, issue by issue, by an English-language pullout of translations, edited by Austin Woerner under the name Peregrine. When the magazine closed, Woerner reflected on the experiment in an interview with the journal Asymptote, marking how unusual the arrangement had been — a mainland commercial literary magazine maintaining a standing translation programme as part of its identity. The bilingual format embodied the magazine's cosmopolitan self-image and gave it an international readership out of proportion to its circulation. It also created a durable bridge to Anglophone publishing: the anthology Chutzpah!: New Voices from China, collected by Ou Ning and Austin Woerner and published in the University of Oklahoma Press's Chinese Literature Today book series, drew sixteen selections — three of them nonfiction — from the magazine's pages, in translations by leading translators of Chinese. The anthology carried its readers from the suburbs of Nanjing to the mountains of Xinjiang and London's Chinatown, and reviewers credited it with shattering the illusion of a monolithic China, presenting instead a polyphony of new voices — exactly the effect the magazine itself had aimed at.

Frequency, Recognition and Closure

Chutzpah! began as a bimonthly. In September 2013 it was restructured from a bimonthly to a quarterly publication — a step that signalled financial strain — and in February 2014 it ceased publication due to business pressure; biographical records of its editor describe it as a critically acclaimed literary magazine that stopped in 2014 mainly for financial reasons. The run had lasted sixteen issues. The recognition it gathered was disproportionate to that brevity. The magazine was named in international coverage as one of China's most innovative literary magazines; the anthology drawn from it was named one of the Best Books of 2015 by Artforum, which praised the stories that sing out from obscure places and people as uniquely fitting the peculiarities of the country; and its issues on minority and dialect writing were cited as firsts. The pattern is familiar in magazine history — commercial fragility alongside cultural influence — but in the Chinese context it had a particular edge: an adventurous literary bimonthly, published by a commercial fashion-and-lifestyle group whose economics were driven by other titles, could be ended by business pressure even at the height of its reputation, and it was.

Ou Ning and the Magazine's Wider World

Chutzpah! cannot be separated from its editor's wider projects, because Ou Ning made it one instrument among several in a single campaign about rural China and cultural independence. The same years saw his Bishan Commune and School of Tillers in Bishan village, spaces for intellectuals and practitioners devoted to the rural reconstruction movement, and his curating of the 2011 Chengdu Biennale exhibition The Solutions: Design and Social Engineering. The magazine's first issue, on the hometown of Asia and intellectuals' rural construction movements, was the literary wing of that campaign, and its continuing rural-urban themes kept literature in conversation with the social questions its editor pursued in architecture, art and activism. Ou Ning was based in Bishan village from 2011, editing a Guangzhou magazine from the countryside it wrote about — a biographical fact that captures Chutzpah!'s stance. He was also a member of the Asian Art Council at the Guggenheim Museum in 2011 and director of the Shao Foundation, a reminder that the magazine's editor moved in international art-world circles and brought those connections to a Chinese literary title.

Legacy

Tiannan's modern incarnation, Chutzpah!, is closed, its last issue published in February 2014 after a run of sixteen issues from April 2011. Its legacy is documented on several levels. As a magazine, it demonstrated that a mainland Chinese literary title could be simultaneously commercially published, editorially adventurous and bilingual — organising issues around dialects, minorities, diaspora and science fiction, and carrying Uyghur and Kazakh writing to a national audience for the first time. As a publishing project, it left a book behind it: Chutzpah!: New Voices from China, the University of Oklahoma Press anthology that preserved sixteen of its selections in English and was honoured by Artforum. As a biographical episode, it remains the literary chapter of Ou Ning's career between the Get It Louder biennales and the Bishan project. And the title itself had the last word on impermanence in Chinese publishing: founded in 1982 for folk literature, sold in 2005, idle for five years, reborn in 2011 to international acclaim and closed in 2014, Tiannan's two lives show both how much a magazine licence can contain, and how briefly — three incandescent years — a great editorship can make it burn.