STORY · July 2026
The Backwall Method
Documenting artists for 20 years — without asking a single scripted question
In 2005, I started a website called Backwall. I was 22 years old, two years out of art school, and I had a simple conviction: the people making interesting work were being overlooked by the press, and their stories deserved a better format than a press release.
Backwall began as a student forum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. It ran for about two years, then went dormant. I revived it in 2023, almost twenty years later, with a different format and the same instinct.
The Unstructured Interview
The defining feature of a Backwall conversation is the absence of a script. I do not prepare questions in advance. I do not send a questionnaire. I show up, we talk, and I let the conversation find its own shape.
This is not laziness. It is a method — one that took years to recognize as such. When you stop deciding what matters in advance, the artist shows you what matters to them. The difference is everything.
Over time, I noticed a pattern: the most memorable conversations were not the ones where I asked clever questions. They were the ones where I listened long enough for the artist to drop the performance. That is when the real story emerges — the detour they took, the failure they don’t talk about in public, the strange habit that reveals how they think.
Why It Works
In an industry obsessed with the final product, Backwall documents the process. I am interested in the artist’s life trajectory — where they started, what broke them open, what they returned to again and again.
The method works because it mirrors how independent practitioners actually operate: not through rigid plans, but through iterative discovery, through conversation, through the willingness to follow an unexpected thread.
Twenty years later, the Backwall archive has become something I did not plan for: an oral history of a generation of Chinese independent artists, told in their own words, in their own rhythm.
Backwall → backwall.cn