Beijing's 20 Most Interesting People: DJ Weng Weng

We have a saying here at the Beijinger that even if nothing interesting could be written about 99 percent of Beijing's approximately 20 million people, there would still be 200,000 great stories remaining. To us, what makes a person interesting was not only their long-term presence in Beijing, but that they had done something of note within the last 12 months. Here is one of our picks, and you can always find more in our October issue, now out on the stands.

DJ Weng Weng
Organizer, INTRO Festival

Why he’s interesting: One of the captains leading INTRO, Lantern club and the now-defunct Acupuncture records, Weng Weng has been part of the Beijing music scene since the1990s when he was a guitarist for local rock bands, including Hongshao Rou. He started DJing in 1997 and hasn’t stopped since. Just this past May his epic transformation of INTRO, from what everybody was afraid would be another repeat of the dull 2012 Crab Island debacle, into a mad laser techno spectacle at the old Shougang Steel factory, we dare say promoted this man to admiral of the city’s burgeoning electronic music and party culture armada.

What he says: “Beijing was quiet when I was a kid; the rhythm of life was slow. The city has changed a lot since then, but it still has its own distinctive feeling…The electronic scene got started around 1996, when some international students started to throw electronic parties in a bar called Keep in Touch. I started DJing in 1997. A lot of the people I knew from the rock scene at that time stopped making music, but I’m still following my dream… When somebody writes the history of the Beijing music scene, all I’d like them to say about me is: ‘He persisted.’”

Photo: Judi Zhou