Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 8, Issue 2-3, 2021

This article examines the digital artworks created by three Chinese diaspora artists based in Europe: Berlin-based queer filmmaker Fan Popo’s short digital video Lerne Deutsch in meiner Küche (‘Learn German in my kitchen’), London-based performance artist Zeng Burong’s performance Non-Taster and London-based writer David K. S. Tse’s digital radio play The C Word. All three artworks were created in 2020 during the pandemic and all deal explicitly with the issues of anti-Asian racism and cross-cultural understanding. All these artworks also engage with issues of food and culinary practices. Through an analysis of the three artworks, I suggest that making digital art about food can serve as a creative and culturally sensitive strategy to engage with pandemic politics. Indeed, in an era of rising nationalism and international antagonism, diasporic Chinese artists have turned to seemingly mundane, apolitical and non-confrontational ways such as creating digital artworks about food to engage with the public about important social and political issues. This functions as a creative and culturally sensitive strategy to conduct social and political activism and to enhance cross-cultural understanding. It also showcases the political potential and social relevance of digital art for a pandemic and even a post-pandemic world.

The world during the COVID-19 pandemic became more divided than united, both between states and among individuals. Opinions are polarized partly because, as I have observed in urban China, the public is simultaneously preoccupied by the very near (the self) and the very far (the imagined ‘world’), but neglect the space in between, and as a result fail to recognize how the social world is concretely constituted through interconnected differences. This article advocates a way of perceiving the world by taking ‘the nearby’ (fujin in Chinese) as a central scope. The nearby is a lived space where one encounters people with diverse backgrounds on a regular basis. The nearby brings different positions into one view, thus constituting a ‘scope’ of seeing. Such a scope enables nuanced understandings of reality and facilitates new social relations and actions. The nearby could form a line of resistance against the power of the state, capital and technology, that is turning local communities into units of administrative control and value extraction. This article calls for a ‘First Mile Movement’, in which artists, researchers and activists work together to help facilitate citizens with the construction of their nearby as a basis for reflecting upon life experiences, testing grand ideologies and engaging in public discussion.

In early 2020, Chinese people engaged in several rounds of extraordinary online campaigns in response to the government’s handling of the outbreak of coronavirus. During these campaigns, visual images played a crucial role in facilitating netizens to inform each other, escape official censoring machinery, express anger and frustration, excavate truth, document reality and mobilize online support and protest. In particular, images related with Dr Li Wenliang, one of whistle-blowers of the soon-to-be pandemic who himself died of the virus, and Dr Ai Fen, the first doctor to share information about a possible coronavirus diagnose among her colleagues, became the focal points of the unprecedented online mobilization successively. Millions of netizens participated in the effort to circulate these images (and stories behind them) and invented ingenious ways to continue the endeavour when confronted by the heightened censorship. Various art communities and individuals have done their share to fuel in this momentum of visual mobilization and there was a surge of call for public participation in responding to the pandemic through participatory public artworks. Maskbook, initiated by artist Wen Fang, and One More Day led by MeDoc, are two exemplary cases. Through analysing these images, this article discusses China’s grassroots visual mobilization to claim for freedom of speech and access to truth in the wake of the massive health crisis and articulates its contribution to the formation of a bottom-up visual discourse that challenges the state’s media discourse in interpreting the pandemic as a victory of government leadership.

This article analyses what Margaret Atwood calls the literature of ‘ustopia’. The portmanteau term brings together the utopia and dystopia categories because Atwood argues that one contains the germ of the other. Ustopian writing is a body of work that is helpful when it comes to understanding current destruction to lives and livelihoods, and imagining our post-coronavirus future. The present article thus explores four works of ustopian writing from China and the diaspora, three of them having been written before the current COVID-19 crisis but all shedding light on it. Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary (2020) represents the first real work of postcoronial literature in what seems likely to be an outpouring over the coming years. It is anticipated very ably by the precoronial texts also analysed here – Mo Yan’s Frog ([2009] 2014), Ma Jian’s China Dream (2018) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) – which presage the post-COVID dispensation. Taken together, they form a body of work that the article terms pericoronial writing.

Diaries offer a private space to play tic-tac-toe with intellectual, artistic and personal complexities, practice wielding or calling upon language, confess amorous feelings, sharpen the switchblades of resentment, and so on. Accompanied by this general outline of what a diary is for, the diaries made by contemporary Chinese artists related to COVID-19 are neither written for themselves or for their future readers. It should belong to the third category as a public diary for living contemporary people. It challenges the concept of ‘author’ both in literal and art discourse and might make the identity of the diary more and more obscure. Are these diaries still private art? Or before it was created, has it already become public art? This article will focus on visual diaries made by three contemporary Chinese artists, and study how the artists ‘write’ their own ‘memory’.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an uncanny rift between tact and touch as it expands the virtual towards its potential. Layer upon layer of new information has been repeatedly revising and reformulating our sense of touch. The unconditional freedom of touch needs to be rendered accountable in this rift of time and space. The act of touching entails individual acknowledging the risk of reaching towards the unknown or the known. Tracing with a tactile sense of touch is to be tactful about how, where and what can such act of touching could reach, especially in the context of communicative technology. This article focuses on the possibility of virtual sensibility by challenging ways to feel touched beyond the nostalgic narratives that attempt to indict communicative technology with the loss of touch. To replenish and reinstate touch through tele-synaesthesia performance, I ask: how to elongate our somatosensensation and echo the embodied experience of touching through virtual connectivity? Tele-synaesthesia performance joints telematic and synaesthetic experience together to embody the incorporeality of touch through virtual connectivity. It embodies the injunction of physical contact and challenges what can and cannot be touched by suturing one sensuous modality to another. Inspired by Paul Sermon’s artistic production of Telematic Quarantine (2020) and Pandemic Encounters (2020), that tele-presents the stories of self (isolation), I have created The Best Facial (2021): a series of one-to-one participatory tele-synaesthesia performances, where I became a virtual aesthetician and performed ‘virtual facial care’ on Zoom amid the second wave of the pandemic in the United Kingdom. In this article, I will discuss how tele-synaesthesia performance could trigger tactile experiences in the participants in reference to Michel Foucault’s concept Heterotopia (1986) that allegorically address the incompatible physical places in the society. I discuss how to elicit an affective sensory response from non-tactile senses through virtual touch, as stated by Naomi Bennett’s ‘Telematic connections: sensing, feeling, being in space together’ (2020). I refer to Legacy Russell’s discussion on glitch (2020) to analyse the possible future of tele-synaesthesia performance and its potential for expanding virtual connectivity with an ethical touch of a non-performative refusal of the present.

With the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, much of the world has been experiencing isolation and quarantine. Digital technology, especially the internet, has become the essential method of communication when social distancing measures constrain physical contact. The global health crisis leads to a dynamically increasing reliance on digital equipment contributing to a posthuman world. The article will take Shanghai-based multimedia artist Lu Yang (1984–) as a representative example to explore an alternative posthumanism subjectivity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Built theoretically on Kathrine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism concepts of virtual bodies, this article will examine how Lu Yang’s work articulates the interactive relationships between humans and the material world to go beyond the conservative corporeality and contribute to a renewal of posthuman subjectivity. In Lu Yang’s recent projects created during the pandemic, such as Doku × The 1975 ‘Playing on My Mind’ (2020) and the live-streamed piece Delusional World (2020), the artist experiments with different strategies to break down social-cultural constraints and transcend established dualisms of gender binaries, life and death, human and non-human. With a close investigation of Lu Yang’s multidisciplinary artistic practices, this article intends to argue how a new subjectivity emerges in contemporary Chinese art and its roles in the current COVID-19 pandemic world.

In early 2020, the unforeseen COVID-19 has brought the art world to its knees, particularly the contemporary art scene needs viewers and feedback to survive. Artists require new channels connecting them with their audiences, while artists’ work needs to be seen and appreciated by the public to sustain its value. In the face of social distancing restrictions and limited visitors, however, many international exhibitions are forced to cancel or postponed. With less to no patronage, will the global pandemic bring the end of the art world? As the global pandemic has forced most social and cultural events moving online, the art biennials are no exception. This article examines the art biennial, the Olympics of the art world, to rediscover the meaning of ‘art’ before and after COVID-19. Integrating virtual presentation and digital campaign between the Taipei Biennial and the Shanghai Biennale, the first running art biennials across the Taiwan Strait, this article analyses and presents the art world’s potential shifts in the post-pandemic future.

Amid the restrictions on travelling and gathering imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, exhibitions with international collaborations in Hong Kong experimented with curating across borders and time. This article examines recent curatorial practices in Hong Kong’s art institutions, particularly relating to site-specific installations and performances that had to cope with the artist’s physical absence and institutional restrictions. Two site-specific art commissions – Shirley Tse’s Negotiated Differences (2020), installed at the M+ Pavilion, and Eisa Jocson’s Zoo (2020), performed at Tai Kwun Contemporary – serve as cases in point illustrating how curatorial practices enabled remote collaboration and display reconfiguration to address authorial absence and institutional interventions during the installation and exhibition phases due to the pandemic. The former case study decentralized the authorial control of artistic criticality from the artist to a collective curation and installation process, while the latter evolved in accordance with protean institutional and social contexts by actively changing the display during the exhibition. Despite the pandemic-imposed separation and restrictions, these two case studies shed light on how curators collaborated with artists and participants across distance and time, actively and flexibly forging responsive and relevant connections between site-specific artworks and the immediate present. Their curatorial practices – as artistic mediation – complicated the conceptual framework of artworks and exhibitions through co-curation and co-production with artists, thus lending a collaborative dimension to the model of exhibition-making and the role of the curator as the ‘curator-as-artist’.