Alumnus Matthew Byrne founds Spittoon Collective in Beijing and Gothenburg

Spittoon is a Beijing based platform for artistic expression with bases in Chengdu and Gothenburg, Sweden.

For the last few years, he has become the founder and director of the Spittoon Collective, an events and publication based platform that is based in Beijing but with a developed satellite in Chengdu and now recently in Gothenburg, Sweden. 

The Spittoon Collective began in May 2015 as a poetry night in a bar called Mado on Baochao Hutong in Beijing. It began very organically as a way to bring together some friends into a group to share and perform poetry in a bar environment – it quickly picked up due to the international quality of the patrons and readers who attended.

Over the course of the last 4 years, The Spittoon Collective has grown to a community that holds four regular events for each week of the month in Beijing – Spittoon Book Club, Spittoon Fiction, Spittoon Slam and Spittoon Poetry – taking place in that order and with their own organizer / organizers. In Chengdu they have grown to holding two regular events a month, Spittoon Poetry and Spittoon Fiction.

Events in collaboration with organizing partners have ranged from a large-scale live painting competition in Beijing with Shanghai Madness to Beijing’s first Grand Slam poetry event with BLK GEN and Beijing’s first LGBT story telling event.

The Spittoon Collective started Spittoon Literary Magazine to publish the work that being read in the Spittoon Poetry and Spittoon Fiction reading nights. Since its fourth issue, Spittoon Literary Magazine has been dedicated to translating and publishing the best new Chinese-language writers into English. Its evolution is particularly exciting as a publication entirely in Chinese with English translation.  

Their readership is largely non-Chinese readers who want an introduction to contemporary Chinese writing and writers. There are plenty of translated anthologies and books of Chinese literature before 2000, but there is much less in the way of a publication that has its finger on the pulse of Chinese writing and writers today. That's what Spittoon Literary Magazine offers.

Founder and director, Matthew Byrne says: "We want the Spittoon Literary Magazine to be an excellent representation of Chinese literature in the West. The image that Western media paints of contemporary China's is one of an artistic wasteland. Spittoon hopes to change that by publishing writing that innovates, excites, and moves readers. Our development of event communities in cities across China, (Beijing, Chengdu and now Shanghai) and the subsequent communication of those cities with our Swedish community in Gothenburg, encourages us to continue developing communities across the world - be it home eventually, or some other exotic destination. Through this combination of publication and community we seek to create a larger international community of idea sharing and literary / artistic forms of cultural exploration / expression."

Find out more about Spittoon by watching this short documentary.

Visit Spittoon's website here.

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