Cultural Strategy & Creative Practice | China and the German-speaking world
ExploreWhy now
For culture to move, someone has to step past their own borders first.
AI is reshaping the world ever faster, and the next twenty years will likely be anything but calm. The more that is true, the easier it becomes for a single logic of efficiency, reach and growth to fill everything and push different people in the same direction.
Yet culture was never one thing. It is many ways of living and searching, moving back and forth between people.
Read the manifestoOur name
Our Chinese name, 化成社 (Huà Chéng Shè), comes from the Book of Changes.
化 Huà: becoming, slowly, through living and dealing with one another.
成 Chéng: the shape that grows out of the process.
社 Shè: originally a patch of ground where people gathered. First there is a place to meet; then there is a community.
COLERE: Latin, the root of “culture”: to cultivate, to care for, to inhabit, to honour.
Two names from two traditions, pointing to the same thing: culture is something we grow together.
Founder
My name holds the sky and the ocean. My father took it from a line in Les Misérables: greater than the sea is the sky, and greater than the sky is the human soul.
From a small town near Nanchang I went on to Beijing, Berlin and Shenzhen, working in brand consultancy and cultural diplomacy, and in finance and tech. Each time, I ended up somewhere past a border. The further I went, the more I believed that times of change need someone to take that step first.
That is why COLERE exists.
Tianyang Wu, Founder
MA in Culture and Media Management from Freie Universität Berlin, working across Chinese, German, and English. Shaped brand positioning and expression at MetaDesign Berlin, fostered collaborations between Chinese and German cultural institutions as a diplomat, and connected OPPO and OnePlus with users and communities abroad.
What we do
COLERE is rooted in China and connected to the German-speaking world. Every project starts from a seed, and we do three things:
01
Listen first, then see what you truly have and who it matters to.
Includes
For example: before a Chinese tech brand enters Germany, we check how its name and slogan will read in German.
02
Find the people who want to commit, and design the partnership.
Includes
For example: connecting a home-appliance brand with a German design exhibition, so its story is told within design history.
03
Make it happen, and leave relationships and new seeds behind.
Includes
For example: after an exhibition closes, the people and institutions who took part become the starting point of the next project.
Companies doing business between China and the German-speaking world that want culture to make their brand understood and trusted.
We work closely with museums, universities and cultural institutions in both countries to build cultural projects for companies.
Principles
Culture stays alive only while people keep taking part in it, interpreting it and practising it. Machines can do much for us; they cannot take part for us. So every project we make leaves room for people.
First understand the content and the setting it lives in, then talk about reach and growth. Every project starts with research into its audience and cultural context.
Common does not mean uniform. Both the Chinese and the German side deserve to be heard, and we make each of them clear in Chinese, German and English.
Beyond revenue and exposure, we care about deeper participation and longer relationships. A good partnership is shared care that keeps an institution, or a group of people, together through change.
COLERE Notes
Field notes from the borders (coming soon).
Contact
A brand project, an exhibition, or an idea you want understood in another culture.
seed@thecolere.org
