DSL Magazine: Issue 11

In 1994, a loose group of artists including JODI, Olia Lialina, Vuk Ćosić and Heath Bunting, all producing works on, with and about the internet, was identified by critics as a movement called “net.art”. Much has been written about net.art, and over the years the term has lost its dot, becoming - as “net art” or “internet art’ - a much broader category indicating art that takes the internet as its chief medium. In its early years, net art was made by artists who had been active participants of the Web 1.0 era, and who created works closely connected to practices like amateur web design, e-mailing, and webring curation. While net art was traditionally characterized by a medium-specific focus on ephemerality, interactivity and global connectivity, after 2000 the parameters of internet art expanded along with the development of its grounding technology (Rhizome, 2019). As Web 2.0 restructured the landscape of online vernacular creativity, and as internet access moved from bedroom desktops to portable devices, internet art became, more broadly, a term to define both art distributed through the internet and art about the internet; along with its institutionalization, “new media art” became a more current term encompassing most of the same parameters. Curiously, internet art has briefly resurfaced with the emergence, in the early 2010s, of the term “post- internet”, which was postulated by artists Artie Vierkant, Gene McHugh and Marisa Olson as a new turn in internet-related art being produced in a context of increasingly pervasive connectivity and everyday computing (Connor, 2013). Post-internet art moves away from a focus on the early web and its vernaculars, and describes “an art object created with a consciousness of the networks within which it exists, from conception and production to dissemination and reception” (Archey & Peckham, 2014) It is a testament to China’s leapfrogging technological development that internet art received one of its earliest institutional recognition with “Art Post-Internet”, a show curated by Karen Archey and Robin Peckham for Beijing’s UCCA in 2014. This exhibition introduced Chinese audiences to the main protagonists of post-internet art, emphasizing how the “post-” prefix did not refer “to a time ‘after the internet, but rather to an internet state of mind--to think in the fashion of the network” (Archey & Peckham, 2014). Before this exhibition, a few Chinese artists had been creating artworks that confronted and examined the internet “with Chinese characteristics” they grew up with, but there was no critical discourse about an emerging Chinese internet art movement. As the Chinese internet entered the popular imagination around the globe as a separate and exotic socio-technical environment hidden behind the “Great Firewall”, artists began to reflexively connect their work to this imaginary. In a 2014 conversation Michelle Proksell asked artist Miao Ying about her thoughts on the term “Chinternet” (a humorous abbreviation of Chinese internet). Miao didn’t think the term was offensive, and while unfamiliar with it she thought that, just as terms like ‘Chinglish’, it described a phenomenon that was “real enough” to require a name. In her subsequent work, Miao employed the term as a way to reclaim knowledge and agency on the internet she experienced inside China, and her website installation “Chinternet Plus” (2015) is a detournement of an official policy buzzword (Internet Plus) that utilizes the term to parodic effect. As of 2019, the term ‘Chinternet’ has found an unexpected popularity in the art world, as most recently exemplified by “Chinternet Ugly”, an exhibition curated by Ros Holmes and Marianna Tsionki at the Manchester Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in May 2019. Growing up alongside a quickly developing network infrastructure, and experiencing the internet “with Chinese characteristics” briefly described in the previous section, several Chinese artists have turned their practice towards this medium. In the rest of this magazine, we introduce multiple Chinese artists engaging with the internet and ordered them in a rough chronological basis according to three “generations” that correspond to the 70hou, 80hou and 90hou (‘post-70s’, ‘post-80s’ and ‘post-90s’) age groups commonly debated in China. We believe that such a generational division helps correlating artistic practices to different stages of technological development and domestication of the internet. The first generation, consisting of individuals born during or before the 1970s like Liu Zheng, Liu Bolin or Cao Fei, illustrates how artists working in fields like video art, photography or new media started incorporating the internet in their own works. This generation of Chinese artists, which we term “pre-internet”, embodies a period of time when the medium was still in its early days, still glowing in the haze 11 The Chinternet