SHIFT, a Japan-based international online magazine that features creative culture, has announced the continuation of their short films and calendar competition for 2011-2012. (Last year’s results were quite impressive.) The details for submission have been included below.

DOTMOV Festival 2011

Online magazine SHIFT presents DOTMOV Festival 2011, a digital film festival aiming to discover talented creators and provide them with an opportunity to show their works. Works submitted from all over the world will be screened throughout the world venues from November 2011 (screening schedule will be different depending on the venue). Last year‘s total submission was

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The story goes that Wang Momo (王卯卯), an undergraduate at the Communication University of China, was doodling on her blog one day and came up with a peculiar yet distinct rabbit-like creature. Built with Snoopy proportions, it also had no mouth and only had slits for eyes. Its name was Tuzki (兔斯基). Three months later, Wang made an animated emoticon of it. (Emoticons are icon-sized images used to express emotion or to “make a face” in text-only online conversations. They are especially popular in China.) Over the course of the following year, Wang continued to animate Tuzki performing various actions, …

To raise awareness for the upcoming Sapporo Biennale 2014, the Sapporo Pre-Biennale Executive Committee are working with Shift Magazine to host an art competition. Submit a proposal for a Sapporo-related art project to be displayed at pre-biennale exhibitions as well as the biennale itself.

The official call for submissions:

Sapporo Pre-Biennale Contemporary Art Exhibition 2011 is holding a International Art-Proposal Competition which includes plans, plan drawings, photographs of maquettes, and sample images. Application period finishes March 15, 2011 has been extended to March 25.

And from their website:

…what would fuel your artistic imagination in Sapporo, or for that

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Much has been made of the vigor of the experimental music scene in Beijing, which many observers — myself included — once expected to bridge the gaps between popular music and mass culture on the one hand and fine art on the other. This singularity, unfortunately, never came to pass, and these various subcultures remain as fragmented as ever before. Yan Jun, the music critic turned musician who organized the semi-regular event Waterland Kwanyin at the bar Dos Kolegas from 2005 to 2009, has recently completed his latest transformation into a sound artist working in concept and installation, a gain …

London, following in the footsteps of several North American cities (and some in the Netherlands), is being overrun by ceramic animals. Indian fiberglass elephants, to be precise. The white, richly decorated creatures have been “adopted” by a number of celebrities (from the logical artistic bunch including Kriti Arora and designers Isaac Mizrahi and Lulu Guinness, to the slightly more eccentric such as IPL leader, scandal-plagued Lalit Modi). The goal of this Elephant Parade campaign is to raise awareness and money of the plight of the Asian elephants (apparently they’re in danger of extinction). The elephants will be displayed until July, …

Carrie Chau enjoyed a wave of popularity in the mid-2000s: My high school friend and mother were both telling about her as this new incredible illustrator in Hong Kong. And they were right, Chau’s illustrations are beautiful, artistic yet still “cute.” I’ve seen her work all around town: On the postcards at the airport store, in a collaboration she did with Kiehl’s locally or in the odd newspaper feature about her.

The exhibition pictured above was probably the height of her popularity here: A Christmas 2008 exhibit at Hong Kong’s Times Square, a heavily-trafficked shopping complex in the urban and …