reflections

Week 1:
Subtleties of Chinese resistance and creativity produced by limitation.

I've been fortunate enough in the last week to have spoken to many people (curators, artists, activists, feminists) who shared their opinions and experiences on restricted freedom and censorship in China and the ensuing evasion tactics in which people use to resist or show defiance on a daily level. It seems to me that dealing with the pervasiveness of censorship and the limits of freedom on speech is as ordinary and embedded as going to do the grocery shopping. Self-censorship, subtleties of insinuation, linguistic hacks and usage of alternative communication methods are common place activities that indeed affect a wide range of people. For example, from a curator needing to “weed out sensitive words” when writing about an artists work, to artists navigating the potential ‘provocativeness’ of their work, to feminist/activists who use foreign social media to organise and communicate outside of the firewall.

The presence and visibility of control is everywhere, from policemen and security forces monitoring every corner, x-ray scanner checks at every subway station, security cameras abound, not to mention digital surveillance and censorship that most people are fully aware of. (unlike the West or ‘democratic nations’ where the control is largely invisible, retreating to algorithmic, legal control). As such this has inadvertently rendered it easier for Chinese people to surmise some kind of logic and understand to some degree it’s inner mechanism. Navigating what is allowed and not can be easily predicted. Out of this context, a plethora of subtle tactics of resistance are generated – exploiting ambiguity in which two opposing ideas can simultaneously co-exist within the same comment, meme, or statement. Chinese artist Ma Yongfeng calls this “micro-resistence”, in which common people enact ‘in the hope to render the controlling body defenseless’

In the face of open repression, the modes of resistance are hidden in plain sight, an steganographic act, two layers of meaning. The controversial is smuggled into the innocent through the semantic cracks _ only to be retrieved through insight into cultural references, linguistic decryption and attentiveness.