Nini Sum
• – • Forum Factory Berlin
About the speaker
Nini Sum is an artist based between Berlin and Shanghai, and the founder of IdleBeats, the first independent screen-printing studio in China. Over the past 13 years, she has been deeply immersed in Shanghai’s screen-printing and subcultural scene, producing a wide range of music posters and screen prints, and exhibiting work across Asia, Europe, the US, and Australia.
Beyond printmaking, IdleBeats became a vibrant creative community in Shanghai through workshops, collaborations, and close connections with musicians, artists, and the wider independent creative scene.
After relocating to Berlin in 2023, Nini began a new chapter in her practice — re-examining material, identity, and her relationship with nature. Her work has gradually evolved from two-dimensional screen printing into sculptural and three-dimensional forms, where organic textures and abstract structures come together to explore transformation, memory, and cyclical notions of time. Through hand screen-printing and wood cutting, she develops a tactile and meditative visual language — an anchoring response to shifting times and an increasingly turbulent reality.
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Additional details
Talk: From Screen Printing to Sculpture — Nature, Tactility and Identity
In this talk, I will reflect on founding IdleBeats screen-printing studio in China - in Shanghai in 2010, and how the choice of screen printing as a medium was deeply connected to the cultural energy and Zeitgeist of that moment.
I will share my experience of building a creative community through printmaking, music, and independent culture over the past 13 years, before eventually relocating to Berlin in 2023.
I will also talk about how recent global shifts, including COVID, the rise of AI and growing geopolitical uncertainty, have transformed my perspective and artistic practice. Moving away from the flat surface of screen printing, my work has gradually evolved into sculpture and three-dimensional forms as a way of reconnecting with materiality, nature, and a more tactile and grounded experience of reality.
