The Hebe Week In Pics (and there is a video!)

ICS Playing Back to Basics 20th Birthday Bash Last Weekend (Sound is not great but enjoy!)

Howard Marks playing some 50's music in Basics!Pritch (Dirty Sanchez) having a laugh @ BasicsSTP and PritchCoffee and Christmas trees at Out Of The WoodsAwesome libraryMore of Lee's toys!Trip to London!Awesome print from Thought Bubble

Far East Feature: Bubble Tea will change your world

When I heard Bubbleology, the original Taiwanese bubble tea was coming to Leeds for one day, I was so super excited I shivered and drooled for 2 days (stroke?). Bubble tea, also called pearl tea, is a traditional Taiwanese drink that became very popular in Asia in the 80s, and now world wide. An innovative drink combined with beverages and desserts.

"Having a cuppa." is such an important thing in British culture, in Asia, tea is also in our daily lifes, our bones, our blood, and our history. In Chinese culture, we create poems for good teas, we have wars fighting for them, we can say sorry, thank you, or good bye with the gesture of making a cup of tea, we need them in weddings, graduations, any occasion.

If you ever get to go to Taiwan, you will find little tea shops in every corner. In there, you get to customize your own favorite teas, from what kind of tea, warmth, how much sugar, to what do you want to add in there, including bubbles, jello, or even aloe vera and so on.

That's why when I went to Victoria Quarter last Saturday, and had my first drink of bubble tea for the last 15 months, I was so happy I could kick someone in the face(?). The Bubbleology's bubble tea is exactly how I remembered, the taste, the bubble, even the machine that packaged the cup! 

So if you're in London, you are very lucky as you can just pop into their shops. If you're in the North like me, join my prayers for them to expand here in the very near future. All hail Bubble Tea!

Look back at August

August was a bit of a crazy month here at Hebe! Watching and making films, partying / drowning at festivals, kick-ass presentations, cool events, photo-shoots, funny interviews, intriguing meetings, Stockholm, Manchester, London and much more. 

We have been working behind the scenes on a number of new projects including Creative Encounters in Stockholm, Taipei and Hangzhou. We have also agreed two new partnerships which we will be annoucing officially in the next week or so.

LOL! Leeds Online has made great strides in the past month and the Facebook Page alone is about to pass 47,000 members. We are also developing ideas for further platforms and content for the project which should start to go live during September.

UK Observing Diary is still kicking ass and attracting millions of views every month. The girls are in the final stages of writing their eagerly awaited first book. Clair is now blogging for Vogue Taiwan so big congratulations to her on that! Shang Ting is leading our charge in Asia and we are putting peices in place for some amazing Hebe events and experiences over there including a Taipei x London x Leeds Creative Encounter!

Looking back at the blog during August, we have been mainly taking pictures! Shang Ting's Street Style, Stacey's Week in Pics and an update and new gallery from Simon on his residency at Whitechapel Gallery in London. We also posted some of the (publishable) pictures from our Barca Crew Reunion including partying with Howard Marks and Louise Rennison. 

We are launching a couple of new features on the blog during September that we are pretty excited about. Plus after around 18 months of trying to figure out our 'about' page, we think we have finally figured it out (but dont hold us to it!)

Peace out for now!

Whitechapel Residency update

The information as material residency at the Whitechapel Gallery is now well underway, with a number of events completed and two free-to-take poster poems by emerging poets and writers now out in the world (you can pick yours up from from the Gallery if you are in London - we're looking for somewhere in Leeds too).

The last event, The Summer School for Literary Perverts, took place at the end of July with a group of around 25 people participating in a programme of activity led by artists, Simon Morris and Nick Thurston, over the course of three days. Guests at the School included Paris-based writer and translator Kate Briggs and Canadian poet Christian Bok. The programme led up to a public event on the last night, with a crow packed into the Gallery to explore the "immersive textual environment" created by participants, and to hear Bok talk about his Xenotext Experiment, through which he is attempting to genetically engineer a living poem.

Upcoming events include:

• a Big Ideas discussion with poet / writer and UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith (you can see his recent performance at the White House here) and writer / critic Craig Dworkin, about their recently published anthology of conceptual writing, Against Expression.
• a series of events and publication launches as part of the London Book Art Bookfair. iam's founding  editor, Simon Morris, has written an extraordinary forward to the fair's catalogue, entitled Do or DIY, and Nick Thurston has designed a limited edition bag.

Planning for the Autumnal School for Digital Perverts is underway, and will be led by Christine Morris and I. We'll be exploring how the Internet and digital and social media are challenging and opening up the possibilities for writing and publishing. Watch this space for more information.

Graduate Fashion In Leeds, London & Antwerp

Leeds
Anna BrowningDaniela MarchettaShamin SultonAnna BrowningKate O'bryan TearKatrina Lee
Claire GreendaleFaith BunceSophie Broadhurst

A couple of weeks ago the Hebe team headed down to the Graduate Fashion Show by Leeds College of Art. We always love to see new talent emerging and and imagine how they might develop in the future.

Each student was required to showcase three pieces, a mini A/W collection. There were some refreshing elements in many of the students's designs, but for some of the students a lack of coherence was a problem, which is an important factor to think about when building a collection. Some students managed to get this coherence though. I particularly liked Rachael Broadhurst's creations, very feminine, and for my eyes, the most complete collection at the event. Crystal Padmore's way of connecting different materials was skilful. Lauren Crowe made a collection that's trendy right now, using plenty of fringe and leather. I noted down that I liked Sharon Banga's good fabric choices. I also liked Anna Browning's square jacket shape. Faith Bunce's hunting inspired works were very memorable and stood out.

Overall, I do think there's an issue of the students being too aware of what's trendy right now, instead of looking for something that's never seen before. If you can not let loose and do something 'out there' when you are at college, when can you, right?

London

University Of Salford catwalk show. Design by Nicola Bream. Earls Court, London

My good friend and partner on the UK Observing Diary, Chia Wen Liu went to the London Graduate Fashion Week. And this was one of her favorite outfits. She thinks this year's designers were of a good standard, but the event itself seemed to lack some of wow factor of previous years. Perhaps the change in sponsor (River Island to George) and/or a smaller budget had something to do with this?

Chia Wen filmed this video of best and awarded designers this year. An you can see a very noticeable character in the crowd.

Antwerp

And finally, let's take a look at the legendary Royal Academy Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp. You can read more about it at Vice Style. 

MANON KUNDIG (Photo courtesy of VICE) MANON KUNDIG (Photo courtesy of VICE)MINJU KIM (Photo courtesy of VICE)