Theme: 润物细无声 Take your time

无论是看中国还是看世界，我们都身处于一个崇尚速度、崇尚宏大的时代。在中国最大城市之一的生活便是一个缩影。我们失去耐心，我们追随“新”和“快”。我们四处寻找发展——“指数型”的发展。这让另外一些问题浮出水面：这样的加速带我们走向何方？高速列车上的我们，忽略了什么？宏大的叙述里，扔掉了哪些细节？

我们想要多角度地去探索这些问题，从商业、科技、慈善、教育、设计…我们将一起探讨在这种崇尚之外，有没有另外一面，等待我们去发掘。

We are living in an age that values speed, opulence and success. Life in Guangzhou, one of the biggest cities in China, is emblematic of that. We want it all, and we want it now. We become ever more impatient, we chase after the new and the faster. We only want to see growth - exponential ones. This is causing us to ask another set of questions: Where are we heading with this acceleration? What are we ignoring as all of us is on board of this fast train? What are the details being left out in those grand stories?

We would like to explore these questions, from perspectives including business, technology, charity, education, design… Together we will explore wether there’s another side besides those desires waiting for our attention.

Garden Hotel
368 Huanshidong Road
Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510000
China

Brian Oshiro

Educator

Brian Oshiro is a lifelong educator who came to China in 2010 after a brief detour as an education policy researcher and legal analyst in the United States. Considering himself a teacher first, Brian much prefers classrooms to government buildings and has long been fascinated by the power of the fundamental unit of teacher-student interaction: the question. Currently serving as a teacher trainer, Brian has devoted the last few years to learning how best to improve teacher quality by “getting back to the fundamentals” and better empathizing with students. Since arriving in China, he has held a number of educational leadership posts and is currently the Academic Director of EIC Academy based in Guangzhou.

Christina Fang

Translator of Nonviolent Communication Dance Floors

Christina translated The NVC Dance Floors - a method to learn Nonviolent Communication (NVC) into Chinese. Christina is an HR manager at one Fortune 500 company. She is also the head of the gender equality organization at her company. She has an adoring husband and a nine-year-old son. As the translator of The NVC Dance Floors she is making it possible to use this method in Mandarin Chinese. She has organized many workshops to promote NVC lifestyle at Fortune 500 companies, Toastmasters, volunteer workshops, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Jinan University, career centres for the disabled and so forth.

Dan Chen

Social good practitioner, CEO of 1KG Box

Inspired by the charitable activity, known as 1KG, 1KG Box is a social enterprise that focuses on revolutionizing the education industries in rural regions of China through innovations and designs. They believe in the power of education in making a fairer world, rather than in consolidating and enlarging social gaps. They want to enlighten the children with curiosity, learning skill, problem-solving skill and spiritual abundance. Before working full-time for 1KG Box, Chen has ten-year experience in management consulting and training. She is now CEO of 1KG Box.

DaybyDay Cantopop

Music curation

Founded in 2015, DaybyDay consists of seven young people in their twenties, passionate about Cantonese pop music since they were little. In the past three years, DaybyDay endeavours to promote Cantonese music and to assist the development of local culture by sharing a Cantonese song daily along with the stories behind it, while organizing offline activities such as Cantonese music exhibitions. With over three hundred thousand followers on WeChat, DaybyDay is one of the top Cantonese music official account in China. Although fewer people listen to Cantonese music and the industry seems shrinking nowadays, DaybyDay believes there is still a group of people, nostalgic about the past and passionate about Cantonese music.

Eduardo Alessi

Industrial designer

Eduardo Alessi graduated from Industrial Design with a master’s degree in Product design at University of Florence and I.S.I.A. He has been working between Italy, USA, China and Hong Kong. During his 12 years of experience, he has designed iconic objects aiming to create a perfect balance between poetic, aesthetic, rational, function and sustainable design. His designs focus on developing mass market products made mostly with environmentally friendly materials.

Erica Kong

AHA Heart-saver instructor, First Respond

In China, first-aid is still something deem as a task for the professionals. In fact, everyone is capable of saving lives. Since its incorporation, First Respond has been trying to set up a first aid platform for everyone. It has provided training for more than 100 thousand people. Erica is one of the youngest Chinese AHA Heart-saver instructors. She is at the frontier of changing the situation that almost nobody knows how to perform first aid, hoping to influence more young people to take on the responsibility.

Fang Lan

Journalist, educator

Plan C Education is a social enterprise dedicated to improve critical thinking and civic education. Before initiating C Plan Education, Fang was a senior journalist at Caijing Magazine and CaiXin Media. Graduated from The Paris Institute of Political Studies, she is concerned with educational equality, social welfare, minority rights and other social topics. Endeavouring to popularize critical thinking and civic education, Fang spent years recording the social development of Chinese citizens.

Gordon Mathews

Anthropologist, author

Gordon Mathews is Professor and Chair in the Dept. of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has written, most recently, The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China's Global Marketplace (2017, with Lin Dan and Yang Yang, and Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (2011), He has in his career written or edited books about what makes life worth living in Japan and the United States, about the global cultural supermarket and the meanings of culture today, about the Japanese generation gap, about what it means to "belong to a nation" in Hong Kong and elsewhere, about how different societies conceive of happiness, and about low-end globalization around the world. His current research explores senses of life after death in the United States, Japan, and China.

Ivan Lam

Technical expert

Ivan has more than 26 years of experience in IT, in the early days he focused on e-government. He has many interests, including fashion brands as well as Agile Management. In 2017, he began to help financial companies in implementing projects with blockchain technology. His main focus now is on promoting the ecological development of the blockchain community by assisting digital innovation of companies with the latest technology.

Jen Wang

Social entrepreneur

Jen is from northern China and had lived in the US for 14 years. She loves nature so much so she quitted her job and moved to some deep mountains and started her outdoor social enterprise CliffHaus.

Stefen Chow

Photographer, artist

Stefen Chow is a Malaysian-born, Singapore-raised photographer. Stefen undertakes long term projects with social conscience. Stefen is the co-founder of ‘The Poverty Line’, a global visual project that contextualises poverty. The project was referenced by the World Bank and exhibited as large scale installations at the Les Nuits Photographiques in Paris, PMQ in Hong Kong and the CAFA museum in Beijing. The project has been extensively featured in international media and is currently in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Stefen reached the summit of Mount Everest at the age of 25 and has been involved in more than 10 Himalayan expeditions. Stefen is grateful to be living his dream; he currently lives and works in Beijing with his wife and his two toddlers, Little Chow and Littler Chow.

Warren Burke

Blockchain entrepreneur

Warren Burke has been always immersed himself in the latest technologies. Whilst at university he co-founded several projects, that connected video game developers from around the United Kingdom. Working with industry veterans, competing in the Microsoft Imagine Cup and opening his first video game studio, all before graduating with honours and moving to Shenzhen. His research and interests following the launch of Ethereum, have led him to be a leading speaker within the cryptocurrency community of China. Developing projects around the concepts of data privacy, cryptography and authentication. He is currently CTO and Co-Founder of Unity Labs.

Yi’ou Wang

Rare disease advocate, Secretary General of Illness Challenge Foundation

2014's Ice Bucket Challenge may be the first time rare diseases gained mass attention in China. Wang succeeded in localizing and promoting Ice Bucket Challenge in China through Weibo and China Dolls initiated by her. Along with Narada Foundation, China Dolls has established The Illness Challenge Foundation. Together they want to build a platform to transform media attention into an efficient system to combat the social injustice that patients may encounter. Their vision is to construct a society with justice, equality and love where everyone could be accepted and supported regardless of their illness or any difficulties. Wang herself is suffering from osteogenesis imperfecta. Though her figure may appear to be small, her belief is potent enough in changing the world.

Yimin Huang

Photographer, native Cantonese

Yimin Huang is a documentary photographer for five decades. Most of his photographs were taken in Guangzhou. Faithfully yet sensationally recording the daily life of people there, his photographs are fragmented pieces of memories that together reflect and frame the social and economic developments in Guangzhou. His photographs have been featured in multiple solo and group exhibitions in China.

Zhenhui Zhang

Architect, co-founder of Raleigh China

Zhenhui Zhang has multiple identities. He is the vice dean of School of Architect and Design at the South China University of Technology. He was the deputy chief architect for SCO Qingdao Summit in 2018. He participated in the design and construction of the China Pavilion, The Crown of the East among many other successful projects. He devotes himself to charity, co-founded Raleigh China in 2008 and has been a director ever since. As a marathon runner, he is passionate about long-distance endurance training.