Once, the pulse of Shanghai’s club scene wrestled with a sense of the future – an energy that could be danced to, maybe before it was understood. Zian Chen revisits Sinofuturism’s brief ascent and disappearance, reading it as both a sonic current and a city’s lost horizon.

SONIC GHOSTS OF SINOFUTURISM

In 2020, just as the world was shutting down, the artist Shuang Li left Shanghai – the city where both her art and nightlife had taken shape – for Berlin. What had meant to be a short trip to set up an exhibition became permanent, as pandemic restrictions prevented her return. Four years later, she returned to Shanghai for her first solo exhibition in China, Distance of the Moon, staged last autumn at Prada Rong Zhai’s historic Art Deco villa. The exhibition title alludes to Italo Calvino’s cosmic fable where the Moon once orbited so close to Earth that people could climb up onto it – until distance, and unrequited love, separated them. As one drifted through the three stories of Prada Rong Zhai, Li’s work felt less intent on telling than on feeling – charting an emotional circuitry through sound, light, and the house’s own atmosphere. Her installations – clocks, chandeliers, and childhood belongings embedded directly into wall-mounted pieces – lingered in the rooms, as though they belonged. A cosmic sense of estrangement found vivid form in her 2022 work Déjà Vu, where footage from a duck-mounted camera in a Geneva animal shelter alternates with recordings of Li’s performance in Shanghai, where twenty agents acting as proxies bid farewell and embraced Li’s friends on her behalf. The same spectral distance extended to her modulated chandeliers, With a Trunk of Ammunition and Demolition Lovers (both 2024), whose forms recall scaled-down versions of Tatlin’s Tower. Both works are sonically animated by Hyph11E, once the artist’s dance companion on Shanghai’s luminous nights.

While the exhibition never states it outright, Li’s collaboration with Hyph11E hums with a broader generational resonance, evoking a part of the city’s club scene that rose from obscurity to global prominence. I’ll never forget Hyph11E’s trademark ferocity: a friend once explained that in a city of inert crowds, her bass pulses summoned movement, while layered, granular soundscapes kept ears alert and attuned to a young EDM city still finding its rhythm.¹

For a long decade, musicians performing under brands like SVBKVLT or Genome 6.66 Mbp helped define Shanghai’s sonic vocabulary, up until the city’s traumatic lockdown in 2022. Many artists from the scene then left the city, effectively evacuating its pulse: Hyph11E moved to the UK, Scintii to Taipei, while Osheyack released Intimate Publics (2022) as a farewell, weaving personal reflection into his parting gesture.² Shuang Li’s audio-visual collaborations with them date back to those contemporary halcyon days of Shanghai, when DJs and visual artists were experimenting across sound, image, and performance. That wave has since slipped from the city’s orbit – much like the lovers who parted at the end of Calvino’s tale.

With this biographical context in mind, one can sense in Li’s modulated chandeliers – shimmering like a sonic ghost – traces of Sinofuturism, a term first coined by theory-driven electronic music producer Steve Goodman (aka Kode9), and later entwined with China’s hyper-charged club culture.³ Surfacing amid contested debates in the 2010s, Sinofuturism encapsulated a set of aesthetic and political sensibilities that accompanied China’s rise after the 2008 financial crisis, reflecting a shift toward a multipolar world order. It was never a formal movement, but rather a site of technocultural imagination – where music, visual culture, digital media, and literature converged into a constellation of speculative desires. While many local artists voiced unease with such labels – a point I return to later – Li’s VJ-like video grammar beneath the large Art Deco coloured-glass ceiling panel at Rong Zhai, along with the exhibition’s choreography of light and sound, evoked a covert club sensibility attuned to this retro-futurist mansion, as if we were in the ballroom of The Shining.

Seated in a small room above the mansion’s reception – and perhaps serving as a lowkey opener – With a Trunk of Ammunition voices a sonic essay written by the artist in android-toned utterances, gradually dissolving into dreamlike, 60s-futurist soundscapes before settling into a KTV-tinged finale. Demolition Lovers, another audio-visual installation, presents a pair of inverted chandeliers suspended from the ceiling of a cavernous garret. Their sound and light interact like two DJs back-to-back in a gig, drifting through a shifting ambient hush, with the BPM nudging upward only briefly, high enough to summon the memory of dancing, but never the dance itself.

While an accompanying note succinctly explains that these audio pieces stem from pandemic-era text messages between Li and her mother, the experience of the two abstract soundscapes felt curiously detached from the theme of nostalgia and longing for home. In With a Trunk of Ammunition, most utterances are spliced and remixed – familial messages absorbed into the pulse of club ambience. Although the exhibition never actually mentioned the club, I was struck all the more by its ghostly presence – each sound and element feeling entirely embodied. Amid the music, one longed for the nightlife of the 2010s and its fleeting ‘moment of global contemporaneity’. Sinofuturism surfaced only in the form of its absence, refracted through distance and loss.⁴

For those still based in Shanghai, Distance of the Moon was less a homecoming than a humming echo of days gone. Much has been written about the rise of Sinofuturism, yet little has been said about what happens when a city’s imagination of the future runs into deficit – when the very brand of Sinofuturism slips into obsolescence. In tracing the social life of such conceptual vocabulary, I offer here a glimpse of Sinofuturism as it once existed on the dance floor. This productive intersection – across the intellectual history of a sonic culture, from its emergence in the UK to its eventual entanglement with the 2010s Chinese scene – reveals a temporal economy that ensnares us: a cybernetic feedback loop masquerading as end sentence on progress. In both Sinofuturism and Mark Fisher’s hauntology, a shared urge toward a transcendental singularity – an accelerated future in which systems overturn and transform – ultimately reveals the limits they share, despite their seemingly divergent temporal orientations.

SINOFUTURISM IN CONCEPT

Carmen Herold, co-founder of Beijing’s Zhao Dai Club, offers a historiography of Sinofuturism in her 2020 essay ‘China’s Sonic Fictions: Music, Technology, and the Phantasm of a Sinicized Future’. Although Sinofuturism has often been compared to Afrofuturism since its prevalence, few writers have, as Herold has, situated it within the lineage of Kodwo Eshun, the Black music critic and theorist who understood that Afrofuturism’s power lies in its capacity to reroute the present as the future, channeling Black diasporic time through sonic and speculative invention.⁵ She anchors this genealogy in Eshun’s evocative 1996 Virtual Futures lectures. It was soon embraced by members of the Virtual Futures organising collective – the Cybernetic Unit (CCRU): a short-lived short-lived fringe philosophy group at the University of Warwick whose philosophical impact endures, despite one of its founders, Nick Land, later becoming embroiled in controversies over alt-right associations.⁶ While CCRU is often cited for its rereading of technical singularity through a Deleuzian framework (and their popularisation of hyperstition and theory fiction), the key point here is to highlight the centrality of rave music in driving the collective’s conceptual mutation, with Eshun as a pivotal figure in conceptualising techno music. This served as a catalyst for Kode9’s 1998 speculative manifesto, ‘Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out: Sino-Futurist Under-Currency’. The text likens the Triads – an organised crime syndicate – to a Deleuzian war machine;⁷ stages a dialogue between the I Ching and Leibniz’s binary; and reframes Fei Ch’ien, a historical Chinese informal value transfer system, as a precursor to decentralised crypto networks, thereby mapping East– West techno-cultural narratives as nonlinear constellations rather than hierarchical structures.

Herold rightly critiqued Fei Ch’ien for its ‘supratemporal fixation on China’, warning that such Orientalist framing risked theoretical reduction – a tendency she sees persisting in Kode9’s 2005 compilation SinoGrime, which fused London’s underground electronic sounds with vintage Chinese melodies. Yet if we consider that Kode9’s Oriental aesthetic actually derives from the work of Black British musicians, such as Jammer’s Chinaman and Wiley’s Shanghai (both 2003), we can push the analysis further: Chinaman, for instance, samples the erhu melodies from Jet Li’s film Tai Chi Master (1993), emphasising the instrument’s nasal tones and slides, thereby embedding a historical Afro-Asian affect that connects Black audiences with Asian martial arts. When Kode9 subsequently codified this Afro-Asian cultural vocabulary in SinoGrime, and importantly, continued collaborating with Chinese producers like Hyph11E and ChaCha – a point Herold affirms – I would argue these events should be seen as part of a continuous transcultural kinesthetic loop linking the UK’s Afro-diasporic future to Chinese futurity. In short, what might initially appear as exotic appropriation in a single work should be complicated into what Zachary F. Price describes as ‘sonic kinesthesia’ between Africa and Asia – a production of shared feeling across cultures through movement and sound.⁸

That said, what unfolded in 2010s China had little to do with these Afro-Asian alternative futures. The promise of a transcultural kinesthesia never truly materialised as a form of cultural reclamation or political resistance. A clearer lens on this nouveau future lies in its emergence through pop culture. Looper (2012), the first Hollywood sci-fi to cast Shanghai as a city of tomorrow, was originally set in Paris. Midway through production, Shanghai took over. Traces of the old plan remain – a character still studies French for his imagined retirement in France. Yet amid his fugitive flight, we catch glimpses of cargo ships drifting along the Huangpu River, jump-cut against the skyline of Lujiazui – the first Hollywood imprint of Shanghai as a figurative site of Sinofuturism.⁹ Soon after, Skyfall (2012) staged a rooftop fight against a post-produced dreamscape of the Oriental Pearl Tower, bathed in the glow of Chinese-language ads for telecoms and fiber optics. By 2013, Her extended the fantasy further – shot extensively in Shanghai as a stand-in for Los Angeles, its skyline reimagined as the lonely architecture of love between human and machine.

It’s also around this time that Kode9, after releasing SinoGrime, began traveling frequently to Shanghai, performing in particular at the Shelter (2007–2016), housed in a real Mao-era military bunker. The club became a trailblazer, introducing emerging genres of grime – raw, rapid-fire UK electronic rap; footwork – fast, twisting beats from Chicago dance battles; and dubstep – wobbly bass and sparse, syncopated rhythms from the UK. By cultivating an open and The Shelter attracted international stars like Kode9 and Shackleton, while also nurturing local voices – Tzusing, Swimful, Hyph11E, Osheyack – who would later bring Shanghai’s producers to global attention, a momentum continued by The Shelter’s successor, Club All.

By 2016, as China launched the manufacturing upgrade plan ‘Made in China 2025’ and advanced the trans-Eurasian infrastructure strategy ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, Sinofuturism began gaining significant traction through Lawrence Lek’s video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) (2016). Narrated in a robotic cadence, the work extends from Fei Ch’ien and maps conspiracy theories about China’s technological ascent. While some artists have positively cited the framework as opening a new horizon for speculation, many China-based producers and contemporary artists felt misrepresented, pointing to its diasporic perspective.¹⁰ As Herold observes, these local producers often turn the focus to lived realities: Osheyack’s Memory Hierarchy (2020) interrogates a landscape saturated with surveillance, while Warmchainss, resident DJ at Shenzhen’s club Oil, treats her sets as speculative echoes of life under global capitalism and techno-autocracy.¹¹

SINOFUTURISM ON THE DANCE FLOOR

Despite Herold’s pointed critique through the lens of identity politics, if Sinofuturism is seen as an onto-cultural yearning for technological singularity, its rhythm was perhaps clearest on China’s rapidly proliferating dancefloors of the buoyant 2010s. Music producer Tom Mouna, who was based in Beijing from 2015 to 2020, describes this scene as diverging sharply from typical club norms, dubbing it the ‘Chinese club-museum ecosystem’.¹² For Mouna, who also held a day job at a Beijing institution at the time, the scene’s distinction lay in its rapid transformation, enabled by club hardware upgrades. He traces the story back to 2016, when Shanghai emerged on the global club map and local labels flourished, cultivating an eclectic sonic palette with homegrown producers becoming key players in a global network.

By 2017, the launch of Club All, designed by visual artist Kim Laughton, ushered in a new era for Shanghai nightlife, placing the audio-visual experience at the forefront through upgraded technology. Towering LED screens on the main stage allowed musicians and visual artists to collaborate, often projecting immersive game-engine simulations, while LED panels at the entrances promoted upcoming events – one urging patrons to ‘prioritise your eyes as much as your ears’.¹³ The club’s sleek metallic surfaces, mirrored walls, and minimal furnishings presented a sharp contrast to its predecessor, The Shelter, whose raw, claustrophobic, yet intoxicating underground vibe stood as a relic of a bygone era. In line with the broader generation of clubs emerging across China at the time, which increasingly emphasised upgraded interiors and high-tech dancefloor amenities, Club All exemplified the shift toward polished, multimedia-driven nightlife.

While Shanghai’s club culture evoked the hardware glint and spectacle reminiscent of China’s 2010s ‘museum fever’, art spaces in Beijing soon sensed the potential of a new cross-current between sound and vision. In 2017, several organisations joined forces to launch the Nightlife Residency, inviting musicians and visual artists to Beijing to probe the thresholds between the dance floor and the exhibition space. By 2018, Beijing’s M Woods Museum opened guī, a multidisciplinary venue where visual and sonic innovations could flourish. Tianzhuo Chen’s 2019 museum solo, Trance, exemplified this convergence, transforming M Woods into a two-day marathon of immersive, high-intensity performances that blurred the lines between club culture and contemporary art.

Yet what truly aligns with the optimism at the heart of Sinofuturism is the narrative shift underpinning this mutation, which renders China especially enticing as a space of possibility. Mouna notes, unlike European and American clubs with their city-specific genres, Chinese dancefloors embrace a global mélange of sounds, offering musicians a fertile space to resist and redefine the audiovisual status quo – until the pandemic brought it to a halt.¹⁴ In May 2020, Alvin Li organised We Came to Linger, a two-night presentation that brought together his local dance-floor peers – Shuang Li and Liu Shuwei – with artists from elsewhere, at Club All, just after it emerged from the initial closure of the first wave of COVID-19. In the press release, he invoked Clubsterben – the German term for ‘club death’ – to describe the emergency imposed by the pandemic. The exhibition aimed to help the club navigate its crisis, facing imminent closure, and to reflect on the ontology, communal life, and transnational solidarities of club culture.

We Came to Linger transformed what might have been mere attendance at a club into active participation in a collective endeavour. Artists contributed video works with generosity, and visiting the exhibition became an act of solidarity. While the show invoked the potential death of a club as an imminent future, it also seized this moment as a rare opportunity: the floor of movement became a space for reflection on the communal body. Kenneth Tan’s All of M (2019) examined how dance culture shapes gender identity. Shuang Li’s T (2017–18), with a sonic contribution from Osheyack, traced the history of Chinese women’s feet as objects of desire – from Taobao customer-service displays of socks to the bloodstained history of foot binding. Meanwhile, Liu Shuwei presented a series of hallucinatory portraits set in The Shelter’s heyday, turning commemoration of the vanished into a meditation on active disappearanace. In an essay accompanying this photographic remembrance, Liu conjures a multispecies, multisensory speculation that rises above the weight of the pandemic. The Shelter is felt once more here – its subterranean passages and damp, mosaic-tiled interiors lingering in the city’s moist, enveloping air:

Perhaps The Shelter now lets rain seep in, and fungi have sprouted in the gaps of its tiles – creatures attuned to music in ways humans scarcely can imagine. Some of that sound has been inscribed in matter itself, echoing in vibrations beyond our perception. The fungi, surely, apprehend these resonances more profoundly than we do: look at their bodies, and then look at our own.¹⁵

Through this vision, Liu Shuwei imagines forms of sonic ghosts, treating the fungi as material traces of the club’s sound and as extensions of human memory. The visitors – once dancers, now reflected in these organisms – become conduits for a radicalisation of perception, offering a fuller, holistic apprehension of the space, its vanished rhythms, and its spectral echoes.

SONIC GHOSTS OF SINOFUTURISM (ECHOED)

By 2022, opposition to the prolonged zero-COVID policy had triggered a mass exodus of those labelled – or mislabelled – as Sinofuturism, including much of the SVBKVLT community and the artists Herold had interviewed in 2020. Many local producers – some of whom had once critiqued Sinofuturism as a Techno-Orientalist idea – now came to occupy a diasporic stance through which ‘China’ circulated as a signifier rather than as grounded experience. Yet paradoxically, as many departed China, the term’s circulation was simultaneously halted. In the wake of club closures in Shanghai and Beijing due to declining ticket sales, nightlife practices have since shifted toward underground spaces or ad hoc destination parties¹⁶ – a movement paralleling a national downturn in museum attendance and the migration of contemporary artists from urban centers to provincial locales. The once-vaunted club-museum ecosystem, it seems, has long since disappeared.

Take, for instance, Sinofuturism’s afterlife: an Osheyack track, paired with doomsday-tinged offshore wind-farm visuals possibly evoking the Yangtze estuary, ticks every futurist box – but the label of Sinofuturism no longer applies. Such was Shuang Li’s 2022 commission for Miu Miu’s Spring/Summer 2023 collection in Paris, made in collaboration with AMO. Audiovisuals unfolded amid crouching underwater cables shaped into a continuous tubular bench with fluorescent green rings – a Gesamtkunstwerk of an underwater runway, its immersive environment ‘upholding the idea of past and present’, and transporting any Shanghai club kid back to the very scene Tom Mouna once chronicled. Yet coverage framed it simply as ‘retro-futuristic’, aligning with the fashion designs that evoke early-2000s school uniforms.¹⁷ The Sinofuturist trope may persist, but the label itself has died.

A recent article by art critic Lai Fei highlights the collapse of the Chinese museum boom, where countless institutions quietly ceased operations without formally announcing closures.¹⁸ Tellingly, this ‘Museumssterben’ mirrors the subtle evaporation of Sinofuturism, whose disappearance is more difficult to reckon with than if it had never existed at all. Curiously, in the post-pandemic era, Western sci-fi has since avoided imagining Chinese cities as futuristic, and no single essay definitively marks its end, apart from a 2023 talk at Art Basel Hong Kong titled ‘What Comes After Sinofuturism’. Yet even the very question it poses – to look into what comes after – seems to skip its autopsy, as if the next iteration were inevitable. In this sense, Sinofuturism’s disappearance resists full comprehension. One might ask whether the reluctance to engage with Sinofuturism’s hauntological dimension stems from an inherent oxymoron in its temporal logic: hauntology lingers in the persistence of the past within the present, whereas Sinofuturism appears to reshape the past in order to project a future.

Mark Fisher’s concept of hauntology is perhaps best grasped through his favorite analogy: Kraftwerk. They ‘used technology to allow new forms to emerge, the nostalgia mode subordinated technology to the task of refurbishing the old. The effect was to disguise the disappearance of the future as its opposite.’¹⁹ At first glance, hauntology – with its critique of the ‘disappearance of the future’ may seem at odds with Sinofuturism. Yet upon closer inspection, both converge in their temporal logic, each orbiting a pursuit of singularity – a radical break from the stagnation of the present, driven by the desire for a transformative moment where systems and time converge into a singular point of accelerated change. In Fisher’s hauntology, with its yearning for genuine aesthetic invention, this manifests as a desire to reclaim futures that will never arrive within our present social formation, constrained by the logic of late capitalism. In Sinofuturism, singularity emerges through geographic displacements – by looking east – much like what Tom Mouna calls global DJs’ fascination with China’s transformative club ecosystem. If you trace Fisher’s early exchanges with Kode9 back to the days of CCRU, you can see where hauntology and Sinofuturism share a common spark: a belief in radical transcendence, powered by the use of neologism as a tool of theoretical engineering.²⁰ CCRU used to call it hyperstition – a portmanteau of hyper and superstition – a mode of speculative invention in which ideas, circulated through continuous narration and belief, shape cultural outcomes – and reality itself. In other words, thought becomes real through the transmission of faith into theory. At the time, there was a deliberate intent to let hyperstitions like hauntology and Sinofuturism circulate between club world and art world, allowing theoretical terms to conjure itself to life and generate tangible impact across the wider cultural sphere.²¹ Yet this very mechanism remains open to failure. As Herold recounts, Warmchainss – a producer from Shenzhen – reflects on her home city: ‘Ever since Shenzhen had the identity of a high-tech city imposed upon it, she has fully discarded any conceptualisation of a futurism.’²² Here too, the hyperstition of Sinofuturism is at work – only in this case re-routed into bureaucratic circuitry of control rather than CCRU’s original creative delirium.

With no one left to circulate the term Sinofuturism – and no more science-fiction blockbusters imagining China as a destination of the future – I feel, as someone living in that once-projected future city of Shanghai, a certain relief. A part of me seems released from the time loop, as I step outside the mode of theory-fiction built upon singularity and a yearning for radical breakthrough that so easily ensnares desire. I have found myself beginning to question that impulsive craving for ontological rupture – whether cloaked as hauntology or futurism – which produces little more than unanchored aspiration and obscures other temporalities that might offer alternative answers. Indeed, only by breaking free from the positive feedback loops that masquerade as solutions to our present temporal impasse can we glimpse the real interregnum: a space where the old is dying and the new has yet to be born, offering neither the consolation of easy escape nor the authority of an all-encompassing theory. Should a new strain of Chinese optimism one day reassemble itself in another form, this ending will at least have taught us that past cultural experiences offer no ready answers – and that prophecies do not rise from what has been.

1 For a similar observation, see: Chal Ravens, ‘The radical noise of Shanghai’s underground’, DJ Mag, 26 November 2019. https://djmag.com/longreads/radical-noise-shanghais-underground

2 Travis Jeppesen, ‘Public Record: Travis Jeppesen on Osheyack’s Intimate Publics’, Artforum, vol.60, no.10 (Summer 2022), https://www.artforum.com/columns/travis-jeppesen-on-osheyacks-intimate-publics-251845/

3 For an interesting read, see: Guglielmo Bottin, ‘EDM Theory and Fiction: The Conceptual Dimension of Musical Waves. A Conversation with Steve Goodman/Kode9’, Sound Stage Screen 3, no. 2 (July 2024): 131–56.

4 This quote comes from Shuang Li’s dancefloor peer Alvin Li, who noted that: ‘If one of the SVBKVLT members dropped a new track on Friday, you would very likely hear it at a club in Berlin, London, or Tokyo a week later.’ See: Alvin Li, ‘I’m Going Out Tonight’, in Elmgreen and Dragset: After Dark (Berlin: Holzwarth, 2023), 57.

5 Eshun’s Afrofuturism resists nostalgia, insisting on a forward-looking evaluation. He frames Breakbeat not as a return to African drumming but as an anticipatory technology – a ‘motion-capture device’ realised on vinyl before digital tools existed. Rooted in Black diasporic practices that rework origin myths, as early Detroit techno reshaped European synths, this temporal logic stands in sharp contrast to Sinofuturism and many forms of ethnofuturism, with its low-tech, high-concept core. See: Kodwo Eshun, ‘Motion Capture’, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, (Lon- don: Quartet Books, 1998), 175–193.

6 Nick Land later became involved in the neoreactionary movement from 2012 onward, framing democracy as an obstacle to technological and societal progress. For an analysis of the rise of neoreactionaries in relation to globalisation and their intellectual networks at the time, see Yuk Hui, ‘On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries’, e-flux, no. 81 (April 2017).

7 In their concept of the war machine, Deleuze and Guattari explore the relationship between the state, which initiates war, and the warrior, who is not necessarily a part of it but rather a nomad external to the state. The war machine serves as a metaphor for a mode of social, political, or creative organisation that exists outside the state’s control.

8 Zachary F. Price introduces ‘sonic kinesthesia’ to describe the embodied, affective experience of sound that transcends cultural boundaries. Price illustrates the concept through case studies such as Fred Ho, whose music blends jazz, Chinese opera, and martial arts philosophy into embodied cultural critique, and Wu-Tang Clan, who fuse African American hip-hop with martial arts imagery to generate cross-cultural sonic energy. See: Zachary F. Price, Black Dragon: Af- ro-Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2022).

9 Nick Land, Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time, (Shanghai: Urbanatomy, 2014).

10 For a case from the contemporary art scene, see Gary Zhexi Zhang, ‘Sinofuturism and Its Uses: Contemporary Art and Diasporic Desire’, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 2021): 86-92.

11 Carmen Herold, ‘China’s Sonic Fictions: Music, Technology, and the Phantasm of a Sinicized Future’, SFRA Review, vol. 50, no. 2-3 (2020).

12 Tom Mouna, ‘Journeys in the Chinese Club-Museum Ecosystem’, Heichi Magazine, 24 December 2020. https://www.heichimagazine.org/en/articles/345/journeys-in-the-chinese-club-museum-ecosystem

13 Tom Mouna, ‘Journeys in the Chinese Club-Museum Ecosystem’.

14 Besides Mouna, Bristol musician Mun Sing noted Shanghai’s club scene ‘doesn’t have to be four-to-the-floor con- stantly. A lot of times in Europe that’s the basis – it’s techno, and anything outside of that is weird’. See: Chal Ravens, ‘The radical noise of Shanghai’s underground’.

15 Liu Shuwei, ‘The Cave of Swimmers’, unpublished, July 2022.

16 Bryan Grogan, ‘This Festival on the Beach is Redefining How to Experience Club Music in China’, RADII, 25 May2021.https://radii.co/ article/zhao-dai, The New Mike, ‘Does the Chinese Electronic Music Market Still Matter to the World?’, Sonicdom, 14 May 2025. https://sonicdomrecords.com/china-electronic-music-market-2025.html

17 Kristen Bateman, ‘Miu Miu Leans All the Way Into Minimal Uniform Dressing’, W Magazine, 5 October 2022. https://www.wmagazine.com/fashion/miu-miu-spring-2023-paris-fashion-week-review

18 The Chinese version of this article takes its title from a lyric – ‘until the building collapses’ – by a Chinese indie rock band, which originally critiqued the 1990s closures of socialist state enterprises, and links it to the quiet shuttering of private museums today. See: Lai Fei, ‘A Eulogy to China’s Art Museums’, ArtReview Asia, 11 July 2025. https://artreview. com/a-eulogy-to-chinas-art-museums-opinion-lai-fei/

19 Fisher’s concept of hauntology describes a cultural condition in which contemporary life is haunted by the lost futures of modernity, understood as a capitalist horizon. By analyzing music, film, and literature that embody spectral traces of the past, he critiques nostalgia and cultural stasis. See: Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014).

20 Another interesting aspect is that Fisher himself connected hauntology to futurism. See: Mark Fisher, ‘The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology’, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 42–55. (2013).

21 Even Kode9’s label name, Hyperdub, draws on the idea of hyperstition, reflecting the hope that theory and music can recursively shape each other. Perhaps the clearest example, however, is Fisher’s hauntology. While Derrida originally coined the term to describe how Marx’s specter haunts late capitalism, Fisher extended it into pop culture. Since his 2005 k-punk blog, his writing did more than interpret – it amplified emerging moods, influencing artists, labels, and listeners in a positive feedback loop. See: Merlin Coverley, Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past, Oldcastle Books, 2020. The Chinese version of this article takes its title from a lyric – ‘until the building collapses’ – by a Chinese indie rock

22 Carmen Herold, ‘China’s Sonic Fictions: Music, Technology, and the Phantasm of a Sinicized Future’.