PhD Including Scholarly Creative Work: Statement of Research Intent

January 2023

Provisional title

How do digital artists engage with the “unspeakable” political discussions in China through digital art?

Research topic

As you can see from the title of the RESEARCH PROPOSAL I submitted, the research project I want to do during my Ph.D. focuses on public secrecy events in China, especially in China in the Internet era.

The core of my theory and the focus of my research is that since China entered the Internet era in the 21st century, some Chinese people have actively participated in the discussion of public secrecy and political events through digital art.

Based on the Chinese political and media ecology of the 21st century, this project uses public secrecy as a central concept, focusing on reviewing and responding to current discussions about politics and digital media.

Part I.

This project argues that in recent discussions of digital media and political participation (especially resistance) by scholars such as Marita Sturken, Lisa Cartwright, Hal Foster, and Michael Warner, there is a consensus that digital media technologies have dramatically transformed the way people engage in politics (13; 1-11; 90).

However, beneath this consensus, scholars remain divided on how people engage in political discussions through digital media technologies (especially digital art). The current debate can be summarized as follows: a portion of scholars prefer digital media technologies as favoring people to rebel against totalitarian institutions to challenge power inequality and social injustice (Marita Sturken, Lisa Cartwright 37; Antonio Gramsci 76; Christian Metz 121; Robert McChesney 39; Manuel Castells 239). However, another group of scholars has also shown skepticism and caution about media technology, emphasizing that digital media and artificial intelligence allow governments to collect more personal data on citizens, monitor people’s speech, suppress freedom of expression, and keep people “invisibly imprisoned,” which in turn leads to unequal political discourse (Nicholas Mirzoeff 24; Karl Marx, Louis Althusser 86; Charles Sanders Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure 32; Michel Foucault 110; Wolfie Christl 4; Benedict Anderson 240; Walter Lippmann 241).

For now, I endorse the view of Nicholas Mirzoeff, Allan Sekula, Roland Barthes, Alvin Toffler, Stuart Hall, Appadurai, and others in the current academic discussion that viewers are both receivers and meaning-makers in the intersection of digital media and politics. Digital media is not only a means of social control but also a source of protection and evidence (162; 48-142; 27-124; 59; 90-103; 234).        

At the same time, I will further respond to the core of my theory by using the combined theory and practice research approach mentioned in my research proposal to study artists and artworks involved in public secrecy events in China in my Ph.D. study. This project builds on the above discussion, which recognizes that digital media technologies have dramatically transformed the way people engage with politics, but argues that the above discussion is based on the Western context and relatively ignores the discussion of digital media and politics in China, a totalitarian socialist state.

Therefore, a discussion of the Chinese context and comparison with Western perspectives provides a more detailed look at how digital media, and digital media art, in particular, are represented and disseminated in the public secrecy of the 21st century? And how do the Chinese engage with political issues through digital art?

Part II.

This project looks at digital media art and the social practices of artists, opposing the dichotomy of two perspectives currently at play in discussions of digital media art and politics in China and attempting to bring them together. While acknowledging the increasing government regulation, surveillance, and suppression of online and political discourse, it argues that Chinese artists are taking advantage of what some have described as the rapid growth of Chinese digital media, the youth of its users, and its wild online culture (Liu Fengshu 228; David Kurt Herold and Peter Marolt 240) to covertly and actively, In turn, political events are disseminated, appropriated, and recreated both online and in reality, resulting in a rich but at the same time unnoticed and unique media phenomenon.

Currently, scholars have two basic and opposing perspectives on political participation in China’s online era, with Ashley Esarey and Qiang Xiao, Min Jiang, and Ya-wen Lei arguing that the Chinese party-state still controls and dominates the Internet, using it to propagate a particular ideology while also monitoring and regulating the people, thereby further suppressing the people’s voice and leading to their collective loss of voice about sensitive times (298-319; 261-287; 291-322). Yang Guobin, Helen Sun, Paola Voci, Silvia Lindtner, and Zhang Ning, on the other hand, argue that the spread of Internet technology has created a new media ecology in which people’s complex identity shift from media receivers to production receivers makes political exploration possible (1; 210-214; 13; 67-145; 281-301).

Using the central concept of public secrecy, this project sets the position between these two voices to discuss more complex, pluralistic, and fluid political and artistic phenomena. The idea of public secrecy used by Marina Svensson, Jesper Schlæger, Margaret Hillenbrand, and others emphasizes, on the one hand, the role of sensitive political events and their related social discourses in public discourse with the complicity of government and the public. Circumstances and their related social discussions are absent from the public sphere with the collaboration of the government and the public, while on the other hand highlighting how the visual arts, led by the photographic form, have a great potential to allow sensitive events to be kept, disseminated, and even discussed in secret (89-169; 191-215). Based on that position, this project also expands the object of study of public secrecy by focusing on how the use of digital media art forms of expression to engage with political events differs from the use of traditional forms of visual art and photographs. In sum, it enriches the current discussion of politics and digital media by exploring how digital technology and visual art are entangled with institutions of power and individuals in a complex and fluid dynamic relationship in the context of the totalitarian state.

Work cited

Althusser, Louis Althusser. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Anderson Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Anvil Publishing, 2016.

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Appadurai, Arjun. The Future as Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. Verso, 2013.

Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. 1978.

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, 2008.

Christl, Wolflie.Corporate surveillance in everyday life. Vienna, Cracked Lab – Institute for Critical Digital Culture, 2017.

Esarey, Ashley, and Xiao Qiang. Digital communication and political change in China. International Journal of Communication, 2011.

Foucault, Michel Foucault. What Is an Author?. Cornell University Press, 1977.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage, 2009.

Gramsci, Antonio, et al. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. International Publishers, 2014.

Hall,Stuart Hall. The Cultural Studies Reader. Routledge, 1993.

Herold, David Kurt, and Peter Marolt. Online Society in China: Creating, Celebrating, and Instrumentalising the Online Carnival. Routledge, 2011.

Hillenbrand, Margaret. Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China. Duke University Press, 2020.

Jiang, Min. Online public deliberation in China. Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

Lei, Ya-wen. The political consequences of the rise of the internet. Political Communication, 2011.

Lindtner, Silvia. Hackerspaces and the Internet of Things in China: How makers are reinventing industrial production, innovation, and the self. China Information, 2014.

Liu, Fengshu. Urban Youth in China Modernity, the Internet and the Self. Routledge, 2013.

McChesney, Robert Waterman. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times ; with a New Preface by the Author. The New Press, 2000.

McLuhan, Marshall, et al. Forward through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. MIT, 1997.

Metz, Christian, and Michael Taylor. Film Language a Semiotics of the Cinema. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. DUKE University Press, 2012.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look:A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke University Press, 2011.

OHCHR | A/HRC/48/31. The right to privacy in the digital age – Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. OHCHR, https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc4831-right-privacy-digital-age-report-united-nations-high. Accessed 11 Oct. 2022.

Schlæger, Jesper, and Jiang Min. Official microblogging and social management by local governments in China. China Information, 2014.

Sekula, Allan. On the Invention of Photographic Meaning. 1974.

Stuart, Hall. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.

Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking an Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Sun, Helen. Internet Policy in China: A Field Study of Internet cafés. Lexington Books, 2011.

Svensson, Marina. Voice, power and connectivity in China’s microblogosphere: Digital divides on SinaWeibo. China Information, 2014.

Voci, Paola. China on Video: Smaller-Screen Realities. Routledge, 2010.

Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone, 2002.

Yang, Guobin. Lightness, wildness, and ambivalence: China and new media studies. Sage, 2011.

Yang, Guobin. Political contestation in Chinese digital spaces: Deepening the critical inquiry. Sage, 2014.

Yang, Guobin. The co-evolution of the internet and civil society in China. Asian Survey, 2003.

Zhang, Ning. Web-based backpacking communities and online activism in China: Movement without marching. China Information, 2014.

“四月之声.” YouTube, YouTube, 22 Apr. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBdOXwdBn5s.

NewChinaChannel. “北京清理低端人口纪录片 华涌《大火之后》.” YouTube, YouTube, 1 Dec. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRSKzrlG7vY.

Research Design

The program will be presented in a combination of text and practice.

Textual component:

As just mentioned in the methodology, I will conduct a case study.

I will analyze the involvement of some artists in public secrecy events, and I will examine :

First, I will ask in what ways artists have been involved in particular Chinese public secrecy events. For example, some artists participated by creating digital art, while others expressed their views through curation or interviews.

Secondly, what strategies do the artists employ to engage with these public-secret events? How do the artists navigate the tension between public/political and clandestine in the face of strict state censorship and surveillance of the Chinese Internet as the public-clandestine artworks they create continue to spread? And how did the Chinese government respond?

Finally, how does the public engage with the digital artworks created by the artists in relation to public secret events? In particular, their impact on the connected actions of resistance.

At the same time, as I mentioned, I wanted to present my project using a combination of text and practice – using ABR practice as part of a holistic or integrated research approach. A holistic approach to research design explicitly links each research project phase while integrating theory and practice. I will do this through Photovoice, art diaries, MAR, asynchronous interviews, synchronous interviews, and online observations.

Practical component：

I will express my understanding and analysis of public secrecy events in China through the creation of digital media works.

I use digital artworks as a model to directly represent the themes of public secrecy and visual art because my self-reflection is not only my self-reflection. I also believe that the combination of practice and text is more powerful than textual analysis alone.

For example, take the first digital media art video I produced for a public secrecy event (the Beijing low-end population event).

https://benmadesign.com/portfolio/low-end-population/

This video, which won the 2022 ADC Award in New York, enabled art practitioners worldwide to visualize a public secret event in China. This is an important reason why I chose to conduct my research by making a creative video.

In this video, I modelled newspapers, changing text, urban explosions, maps of Beijing, and other scenic elements through digital media techniques. These elements are essential in the events of Beijing’s low-end population, such as the explosions and the Beijing government’s inaccurate reporting as the most critical cause of the events.

I used these elements in the video as a metaphor for the event. With some textual descriptions, I was able to let non-Chinese people know about this public secret.