DSL Magazine: Issue 11

6 with Chinese characteristics The ubiquity of mobile devices and the widespread use of wireless access has pulled the Chinese internet towards app-based ecosystems and new forms of social contact: in the 2010s, Chinese users experience the internet through mega-platforms like WeChat, consume all sorts of micro-content across brands and providers, conduct economic transactions through online banking services, participate in a cutthroat gig economy and broadcast their everyday activities with livestreaming. As the boundary between offline and online life disappears behind pervasive connectivity and computational portability, the Chinese internet becomes just a layer of the mediated everyday life of Chinese citizens. From the earliest efforts of pioneering internet users developing encoding standards for Chinese characters and composing ASCII art distributed via email, to the millions of stickers and emoticons circulating across WeChat group in a single day, creativity has always been a central component of the Chinese internet. Users have developed their creative practices and produced content in concert with portals and platforms that have co-opted creativity as a revenue source. And while the striking aesthetics of WeChat stickers, Taobao advertisement or danmu video overlays are becoming pop culture referents for cinema, music and fashion, it is Chinese contemporary artists who have first sensed their relevance and uniqueness. Just as the internet in China developed in an accelerated, leapfrogging fashion, so did artists embrace the Chinese internet as an aesthetic playground, studio and gallery before genres and currents were established to make sense of the new medium.