On a summer evening in 2015, when I was attending a friend’s wedding after-party in a small village in Mori in Northern Xinjiang, a professional aqin – an oral poet who improvises while performing – sat next to me playing his dombra (a Kazakh two-stringed instrument)
The pop star Ablajan hates it when people refer to him as the “Uyghur Justin Bieber.” When I interviewed him in 2015 he said: “People just have a certain image of who I am, but actually I built my image out of my own style.”
A column focusing on emerging forms of Uyghur, Han and Kazakh art and politics in the expansive region of China’s Northwest frontier with Central Asia and Russia – currently referred to in Chinese as the “New Dominion,” or Xinjiang.
