Published July 2026 · Tan Xiaozheng · TANXORA
22 Years of Independent Practice
I graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2004, animation program. That was the start of something I didn’t understand until much later: the decision to build independently.
DONGKOH: A Media That Wasn’t Supposed to Last
DONGKOH (动客) started as a student publication. I was twenty-one years old, studying at one of China’s most prestigious art schools, and what I saw around me was a generation of animators with no platform to share their work. So we built one.
What began as a campus zine grew into one of China’s most influential independent animation publications. We documented the early wave of Chinese independent animation — artists who were experimenting outside the state studio system, outside the commercial pipeline, making work that belonged to no one but themselves.
DONGKOH ran for years. It covered events across China. It became a reference point. And then, like many independent media projects, it reached a natural end. The question was not whether to keep going, but what came next.
The Next 15 Years: 400 Brands, One Person
After DONGKOH, I didn’t go to an agency. I didn’t join a company. I stayed independent, and over the next fifteen years, I served over 400 brands across animation, media, art direction, brand strategy, and cultural production.
Four hundred is not a vanity number. It represents fifteen years of saying yes to the right projects, no to the wrong ones, and learning to tell the difference. Each project taught me something about how brands actually work — not in textbooks, but in the messy reality of Chinese independent business.
The pattern I observed was consistent: most small and independent businesses have good products, but terrible brand communication. They spend their limited resources on the wrong things. They believe that “branding” is about logos and colors, when it is actually about positioning, visibility, and trust.
BACKWALL: The Return
In 2023, I revived BACKWALL — a name that began as a student forum brand at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. It ran for two years, then disappeared for eighteen.
The revival happened because I realized that the method I had developed for understanding artists — through long, unstructured conversations that trace a person’s creative trajectory — was not just a journalistic approach. It was a brand methodology. “Reading people before reading portfolios” became the foundation of BACKWALL’s interview practice, and eventually, the core philosophy of TANXORA.
BACKWALL today is an art interview studio, a video podcast, and a research practice based in Chengdu. It covers the independent art ecosystem — the artists, galleries, and spaces that exist outside the mainstream narrative.
OWNLOG and TANXORA: What Comes Next
In early 2026, I launched OWNLOG (一人创业本) — a Chinese-language toolset and community for independent practitioners. Part methodology, part confessional, part signal room. It is the most personal thing I have built, because it is the closest to what I actually think about independent work.
TANXORA is the English extension of that thinking. Not a translation, but a way of sharing the same ideas with an international audience. The name combines TAN (my family name), X (the intersection of disciplines), and ORA (aura, origin, now). Together, it represents the idea that independent work is not a lesser version of corporate work — it is a different way of making meaning.
If this resonates with what you are building, reach out: tanxora@qq.com
TANXORA · Built independently. Grown together.