Taking the long view
Sun Qiming and his colleagues achieved social media success with their uniquely formatted, yet insightful, posts. A book deal — and much more — soon followed, Yang Yang reports.
Sun Qiming was about to graduate from Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts and Design with a degree in textile-and-fashion design in the spring of 2016.
Rather than seek employment, the 26-year-old talked to three of his friends — 25-year-old Zhu Jian, who also was about to graduate, 26-yearold freelancer Mao Tianhua and 30-year-old Zhao Zhe, a PhD candidate studying biology — about starting a designer brand to popularize science in fun ways.
“WeChat advocates that every account — no matter how small — should have its own brand,” Sun says.
“We initially wanted to design daily-use products to represent our ideas about lifestyle. So, we started a WeChat account to attract fans.”
He recalls this while sitting on a sofa at the group’s 240-square-meter office in Beijing’s 798 art zone. The walls are decorated with funny paintings, Zhu’s chest X-ray and an electronic singing fish named Big Mouth Billy Bass. A stern-looking tabby languidly patrols its territory.
WeChat accounts bloomed in China in 2016. Many “big” accounts’ posts got over 100,000 views each. So, WeChat became one of China’s leading platforms for publicity and advertising.
Sun and his friends wanted to do something different. They named themselves Jubu Qihou Diaochazu (regional-weather investigation group) with the official English name, JBQH Studio.
“People have different weather inside. Some are deserts with blazing suns. Some are tropical rainforests. They have very different, concrete feelings inside,” Sun says.
“We want to show our ‘regional weather’. Our logo comprises an orchid, a fern, a dragonfly in a flask and a stalk of seaweed to evoke the atmosphere of a laboratory and the feel of a botanist.”
They observed that scrolling down the smartphone’s screen to read one long, continuous picture with words was a refreshing experience. The format hadn’t been used extensively. So, they decided to create an image to illustrate interesting facts about the ocean and marine life.
An explanation at the top describes the situation: The ship the JBQH team and the viewer are aboard is on fire. So, they jump off the ship and sink into the deep. They encounter different water pressures and creatures that survive at different depths as they head for the ocean floor.
For example, at 100 meters, it says: “Hairtail fish love this depth the most. But, surprisingly, they don’t swim around, oscillating like snakes. Rather, they love staying put vertically in the water with their heads up, watching the starry sky.”
Three-hundred meters down, the pressure is 29 times that of the atmosphere. It feels like there is a 270-kilogram ballerina standing on her toes on every inch of your skin, it explains.
At nearly 500 meters: “Gas-tankshaped penguins can dive to this depth and stay there for 23 minutes. When they re-emerge at the surface, there is almost no oxygen left in their blood and lungs.”
Readers continue deeper to encounter strange-looking fish, and giant octopuses and squid. They encounter The Titanic shipwreck at 3.5 kilometers and the Chinese manned submersible Jiaolong at around 6.6 kilometers. They next encounter the Monkey King, who’s examining the magical cudgel he got from the ocean-dwelling Dragon King in the classic novel, Journey to
the West. The cudgel is able to grow or shrink to any size and becomes the protagonist’s main weapon in the ancient book.
The journey ends at a depth of over 10.5 kilometers.
The total image is 30 meters long. It pairs written explanations with photos in vivid and humorous ways that made Sun and his team famous overnight.
The post on WeChat soon received over 100,000 hits. They created another post, comically entitled “Flying Into the Sky” a month later.
It picks up where the last adventure leaves off — at the bottom of the ocean — and continues down through the Earth’s crust until users emerge on the other side of the planet.
But they keep going — past famous buildings, birds, spacecraft, the moon, man-made probes, the solar system, the Milky Way, constellations, black holes and celestial bodies that have been observed outside our galaxy, all with clever quips and scientific explanations. The journey covers 9.1 billion light years.
The posts’ popularity enticed an editor from major publisher China Citic Press to approach the team about making a book.
JBQH Studio doesn’t post daily. It took roughly three weeks to create the first long picture in Photoshop.
“We thought making a book would be easy. We’d just print the pictures we’d made,” Sun says.
“But the resolution was too low. And the images were too narrow.”
So, they started over. And they added content to the original two pictures to make them even more interesting. It took two years before the book was ready.
The two-volume book, Wanwu
Manyou Zhinan (The Rover’s Guide to Everything), with images measuring 65 meters long in total, has sold over 150,000 copies, generating over 3.8 million yuan ($0.56 million) in revenue since it was published in November. Another print run is underway.
“It is about 2.57 yuan per meter,” the book’s advertisement on WeChat says.
The studio has continued creating popular WeChat posts in their signature style, covering a range of topics, such as the human digestive system; menstruation and ovulation; typhoons; the human spine; syphilis; staying up late; sperm donations; imperial examinations in ancient China; HIV/AIDS; and the history of using urine in pregnancy tests.
“We like diverse topics. We don’t want to limit ourselves,” Sun says.
Lu Hao, one of the creators, says they often encounter difficulties.
“For example, we wanted to do one about how the human body decomposes. But we don’t want to be scary, disgusting or offensive,” the 26-year-old says.
“We tried different painting styles and made several drafts. It’s finally done, a year later. We posted it on Sina Weibo. It got 10 million views and 20,000 forwards.”
The studio now has a total of 1.5 million followers on Sina Weibo and WeChat. Companies have approached the team to create advertisements.
Perhaps one of the most famous is for the Chinese skincare brand, Pehchaolin, which proved to be “more popular than ‘Going Down Into the Sea’”, Sun says.
The studio has expanded to 21 members. They’re working on creative cultural products, videos and books, in addition to popularizing natural science on their online platforms.
It indeed seems they’ve come a long way in a short time.
We like diverse topics. We don’t want to limit ourselves.” Sun Qiming, co-founder of JBQH Studio