On the 10th February at a televised event hosted by the Beijing Internet Association to celebrate the imminent Lunar New Year festivities, the assembled audience of leading internet executives and media figures was treated to a special performance of a new song entitled 网信精神 “Cyberspace Spirit” by staff from the Cyberspace Administration of China, the government agency in charge of Internet policies, and increasingly, censorship. Continue reading
Month: February 2015
A Wall: art and the online public sphere in China
On the 30th January I attended the launch of A Wall, a web based platform which aims to exhibit and archive a selection of socially engaged art produced within mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan over the last twenty years. The project is curated by Zheng Bo 郑波, a practicing artist and assistant professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, and will be hosted by The Space, an online gallery for contemporary digital arts.
Artworks featured in A Wall include:
Keepers of the Waters, organised by Betsy Damon, with works by Yin Xiuzhen, Dai Guangyu and others, Sichuan and Tibet, 1995-96
Moving Rainbow, Xiong Wenyun, Sichuan-Tibet and Qinghai-Tibet Highways, 1998-2001
Everyone’s East Lake, Li Juchuan, Li Yu and others, Wuhan, 2010
Breakfast at the Plum Tree Creek, Wu Mali, Taiwan, 2010-11
Style of the Northeastern New Territories, Tai Ngai Lung and others, Hong Kong, since 2009
Two Square Metres, Xu Tan, Guangzhou, 2014
As the press release states: “The issues explored in A Wall are diverse. Each project is an individual investigation into one aspect of China’s social fabric, from Li Juchuan’s consideration of the rise of the individual and decline of the collective subconscious, to Xiong Wenyun, Wu Mali and Tai Ngai Lung’s investigations into the impact of globalisation, over-development and urbanisation.” Continue reading