Haze welcomes DJs Attar! and Mickey for “Take Me to Belgium” this month, the first in a series aimed at putting visiting Belgian artists on Beijing’s electronic music map. Why would anyone want to do that? We asked promoter Sid Gulinck that very question.

Who’d have thought that noise hypnotist Yan Jun, folk maverick Xiao He, academic guqin player Wu Na, underground multi-instrument nomad Li Daiguo and tea master Lao Gu would form a band together? They’ve played two shows in Bern and Basel, and their Beijing debut is scheduled for this month.

They had to cancel concerts in Beijing and Shanghai last August due to their lead singer’s throat problem, but only five months later, they are fulfilling their promise to return. In the years since Simple Plan formed in 1999, many pop-punk bands have boomed, ruled, fallen and quit. How has this quintet stayed strong with the same lineup for 12 years? Let’s find out.

Happy New Year, Beijing!

This month greets not one but two turns of the year. To mark that unusual fact, we've dived into our dressing-up box and come up with ... our third annual live-action animal-costume comic-strip Cover Feature. This one is all about a dragon and the trials and tribulations he faces in the Beijing property market. We've all been there – trouble with the landlord, noisy neighbors, overzealous baoan – so here's a tale for the ages. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be in a state of frenzied anticipation for next year's Snake comic strip.

No, not old-school like Sugarhill Gang. In this case, we’re referring to a pre-camera type of photography called cyanotype, also known as a blueprint. Back in the late 1800s, it was the imprint method of choice for engineers and the like; now it’s almost extinct. But artist Zhang Dali is bringing it back to document the life around him in Heiqiao Village, outside the Fifth Ring Road.

Zhang is best known within the Chinese contemporary canon as the man who brought street art to China, with the spray paint outlines of his cartoonish silhouette peppered throughout the city’s demolition zones in the ’90s. He’s since moved on to other projects: sculptures of migrant construction workers printed with serial numbers and strung upside down, photos of more migrant workers overlaid with modern sociopolitical slogans, and of course his latest cyanotype works, called “World’s Shadows,” on show this month at Pekin Fine Arts. We sat down with the artist and his wife Patrizia Galli at his studio to learn more about his journey and his latest art practice.