DSL Magazine: Issue 11

85 Min Jie 闵桀 (b. 1990) is a digital artist and designer based in Shanghai. Her artistic practice spans digital readymades, photography, and social media performance. Min focuses on creating feedback loops between online and real-life personas that she develops through selfies and 3D models. Her main inspirations are posthuman imagery, underground Shanghai fashion, and Taobao aesthetics. As Min herself emphasizes, her foray into artmaking was inspired by the discussions happening in a WeChat group created in 2014 by the authors of this magazine, highlighting the tight connection between social media platforms and digital arts in China. Min Jie’s work is the result of years of research into the kind of vernacular aesthetics developing on e-commerce platforms like Taobao, combined with her own observation of how identities are developed through self- presentation and commentary in social media apps like WeChat. Understanding humanity as a collection of concepts that are interchangeable and fluid, Min believes people find themselves at crossroads where their identities get stuck and divided between virtual and real worlds. Confronting this predicament, she uses photography and 3D modeling to construct figures that embody how identities become aleatory and offer ways to fashion new selves and worlds. Working in the context of Chinese digital media, Min Jie sees the Great Firewall as a membrane that is penetrable and elastic, and she incorporates social media performances into her artistic practice to investigate this permeability. Using a secondary WeChat account that represents one of her multiple online personas, she posts selfies and 3D models on her public “Moments” feed to witness her online contacts’ reactions to her work, adjusting her aesthetics accordingly. She also posts the same images on her Instagram and Facebook accounts, in an attempt to bring her work to a wider audience outside of China. According to her observations, WeChat audiences tend to question the authenticity of her content and ask her why it looks so scary, while foreign audiences react either by liking her posts or by unfriending her. Responding to these different reactions, Min is able to tailor her work for audiences across borders, creating content that is interchangeable across social media contexts and better reflects the fluid identity she seeks to achieve. 闵桀 Min Jie