NeochaEDGE: Where Chinese Modern Art, Brands, and Social Media Meet [INTERVIEW]

NeochaEDGE is a unique, Shanghai-based web firm that intersects modern art and design in China, global brands, and social media. It’s primarily a creative agency and a production house that hooks up global brands with Chinese artistic and musical talent.

Though it was originally a social media start-up for art-oriented people, it has metamorphosed over the past year into a company that serves as greater China’s funkiest digital agency. NeochaEDGE’s site is a “web-magazine” that’s updated daily with peeks into their projects.

About half of their commissions come from overseas brands that seek to tap some of the ideas and visual brilliance of China’s young artists. Recent and ongoing clients include Nike, Absolut, Nokia, MINI, and even Lamborghini.

To get an idea of the agency’s aims and recent projects, Penn Olson chatted with Adam J. Schokora (pictured right), the 30-year old Detroit-born – now Shanghai-based – founder and CEO of NeochaEDGE…

1. How did the site and creative agency come to life?

Our company started in 2007 as Neocha.com, a social networking site for Chinese artists and designers, and musicians. At the time, the team had been seeing all sorts of inspiring creative content from all over China, but, it was painfully difficult to find. It was fragmented online and off, mostly hidden from view. So that site was engineered to be a solution to this problem, to be an online platform to allow local creatives to upload and promote their visual arts and music content.

Although it did quite well, it was focused exclusively on what is still a very niche audience in China – the creative community – so we had a difficult time executing a scalable advertising model. We just didn’t have the volume of users or traffic that advertisers in China want from online media.

All the brands, ad agencies and media we talked to told us they were more interested in tapping the community for the creation of commercial art content (visual and sound), and also to get insights into what was “the next big thing” among this influential demographic – the Chinese creative community. This was the beginnings of a proper business model for our company. Neocha.com quickly evolved into the creative agency (and web-magazine) that we now call NeochaEDGE.

In fact, about a year ago we closed our original social networking site. Although the format of our business has changed, our goals are still what they’ve always been – to help present the best creative talent in China, to support the development of local Chinese creative industry, and to create commercial (and sometimes non-commercial) opportunities in China and abroad for young local creatives.

NeochaEDGE is now a daily curated, bilingual web-magazine that showcases best-in-class creative content in China – including graphic design, illustration, animation, film-making, photography, street art, fashion, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and music.

2. The artists and musicians that are featured on your site produce some fantastic work that contradicts the China-as-Shanzhai-land myth. How do you view these young creatives?