DSL Magazine: Issue 11

12 of information fantasies or a globalized optimism about the openness of online communities and virtual worlds. Some of these artists directed their inquiry towards the internet only more recently, as ubiquitous connectivity and mobile devices started impacting everyday life on a broader level. The second generation, which constitutes the main focus of this magazine, is that of Chinese internet artists, mostly born during the 1980s, who have addressed and incorporated the Chinese internet in their works since the beginning of their art education and career. Many of these artists connect their creative practice to their experience of growing up with the Chinese internet - exploring websites through precarious desktop connections, making friends on early Bulletin Boards, or experiencing the Great Firewall of censorship developing first hand. Artists like aaajiao, Miao Ying and Ye Funa work primarily with the aesthetics and logics of internet-based services and platforms, incorporating interfaces and online content in videos, installations and performances. In contrast to net art’s anti- institutional ethos, this generation of Chinese artists moves fluidly between web-based artworks and gallery exhibitions, experimenting with online dissemination while also obtaining recognition in the art world. Artists belonging to the third generation, which we term ‘post-internet’, are born during the 1990s and have never known the China that was not connected to global information networks. As ‘digital natives’ with Chinese characteristics, these artists learned their way around internet control in their teenage years, and take the innovations of internet art for granted. Often characterized by maximalist aesthetics combining the materiality of post-internet art with new platform vernaculars, fashion design and club cultures, their work transcends the web and moves into new territories including virtual and augmented reality, gaming, and electronic music. Chinese post-internet artists eschew the issue of ‘Chineseness’ debated by previous generations and seek to distribute their works through international connections and collaborations. Moving away from nostalgia, oblique parody and reflexive commentary on the internet, this generation of artists focuses on issues related to fluid identities and posthuman existence. Through this periodization - which is by all means imperfect and contingent - we wish to historicize and contextualize a thriving and diverse body of artistic production that has, up to this moment, received only sparse and insufficient attention. Just as its history of technological development, the emergence of wanguo yishu or ‘internet art’ in China has been peculiar and partly disjointed from global trends and movements. Internet access started becoming affordable only in the late 1990s, and a first generation of pre- internet artists started exploring the medium’s impact on everyday life. Chinese internet art bloomed with the second generation of artists, who grew up alongside the country’s informatization and reflected its leapfrogging development with their experimental and pioneering artworks, carving out a space for this new form of creativity. The third generation of Chinese post-internet artists work at a turning point for the internet industry, as the web disappears beyond app interfaces and ubiquitous computing, and foreground trends and phenomena that will become ever more relevant over the next decade. References Du, X., 1999. Internet diffusion and usage in China. Prometheus 17, 405-420. Hauben, J., 2005. Across the Great Wall - The China-Germany email connection 1987-1994. Sullivan, J., 2014. China’s Weibo: Is faster different? New Media & Society 16, 24–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812472966 Yang, G., 2012. Chinese Internet? History, Practice, and Globalization. Chinese Journal of Communication 5(1), 49-54. Yu, H., 2007. Blogging everyday life in Chinese Internet culture. Asian Studies Review 31, 423-433. Archey, K. and Peckham, R. (2014). “Art Post- Internet.” UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. https://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/art-postinternet/ Connor, M. (2013). “What's Postinternet Got to do with Net Art?” Rhizome. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/nov/1/postinternet/ Rhizome (2019). “Net Art Anthology.” Rhizome. https://anthology.rhizome.org/ Robson, C. (2019). “Meanwhile, on the Chinternet... An Interview with the Curators of Chinternet Ugly.” The Fourdrinier. https://www.thefourdrinier.com/meanwhile-on-the- chinternet and art