Mapping the Mediascape

During the 2010 College Art Association conference in Chicago, I attended a panel session entitled “New Media in China: Understanding the Emergence of the Dragon.” The title of the panel suggested the analysis of work by Chinese artists working in a regional context but with materials made available by internet technology connecting this regional discourse to many other parts of the globe. Instead, the panelists were American and rather than sharing research on Chinese artists, they primarily presented their own work that they had shown during trips to China for sabbaticals, residencies, or grants. I was left wondering where does one find new media artwork made by Chinese artists? Does a category like “Chinese new media” even exist, and if so how does it relate to a global art context? This is to say, does such work reflect a Chinese cultural moment, or does it reflect an era of art globalization theorized as “global art” by figures such as Hans Belting. In Contemporary Art as Global Art, Belting describes defining elements of global art as chronologically placed in 1989 and onward (concurrent with significant events in globalization such as “the rise of global trade agreements” and “the consolidation of trading blocks” ¹ ), challenging to the “continuity of any Eurocentric view of ‘art,’” ² and “rather than representing a new context, [global art] indicates the loss of context or focus.” ³ Would Chinese new media ft this new term, or would it more appropriately be discussed as an extension of Chinese art movements as articulated by Wu Hung in works like Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century. ⁴ In order to approach this inquiry, I’d like to compare two case studies: the work of Feng Mengbo and the work of Cao Fei. As two Chinese artists working with software, they offer a quick answer to the first question: Yes, there is new media, or more specifically, software art, from China. But to understand the relations between Chinese cultural identity and global art culture in their works is a more diffuse and challenging task that requires close readings of their texts as well as a better understanding of the formal elements of software art. In doing so I intend to illustrate how these artworks erode delimited categories of what art is locally tied to place and what art is associated with globalized culture but not in a way that leaves cultural identity in a state of vague displacement. They are instead complex yet specific intersections of different, often opposing, identities networked together with the formal capabilities of software art.