From IRL (in-real-life) to URL: Capturing the art biennial amid COVID-19

In early 2020, the unforeseen COVID-19 has brought the art world to its knees, particularly the contemporary art scene needs viewers and feedback to survive. Artists require new channels connecting them with their audiences, while artists’ work needs to be seen and appreciated by the public to sustain its value. In the face of social distancing restrictions and limited visitors, however, many international exhibitions are forced to cancel or postponed. With less to no patronage, will the global pandemic bring the end of the art world? As the global pandemic has forced most social and cultural events moving online, the art biennials are no exception. This article examines the art biennial, the Olympics of the art world, to rediscover the meaning of ‘art’ before and after COVID-19. Integrating virtual presentation and digital campaign between the Taipei Biennial and the Shanghai Biennale, the first running art biennials across the Taiwan Strait, this article analyses and presents the art world’s potential shifts in the post-pandemic future.

Make this tango viral: Touching toward the untouchable in tele-synaesthesia performance

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an uncanny rift between tact and touch as it expands the virtual towards its potential. Layer upon layer of new information has been repeatedly revising and reformulating our sense of touch. The unconditional freedom of touch needs to be rendered accountable in this rift of time and space. The act of touching entails individual acknowledging the risk of reaching towards the unknown or the known. Tracing with a tactile sense of touch is to be tactful about how, where and what can such act of touching could reach, especially in the context of communicative technology. This article focuses on the possibility of virtual sensibility by challenging ways to feel touched beyond the nostalgic narratives that attempt to indict communicative technology with the loss of touch. To replenish and reinstate touch through tele-synaesthesia performance, I ask: how to elongate our somatosensensation and echo the embodied experience of touching through virtual connectivity? Tele-synaesthesia performance joints telematic and synaesthetic experience together to embody the incorporeality of touch through virtual connectivity. It embodies the injunction of physical contact and challenges what can and cannot be touched by suturing one sensuous modality to another. Inspired by Paul Sermon’s artistic production of Telematic Quarantine (2020) and Pandemic Encounters (2020), that tele-presents the stories of self (isolation), I have created The Best Facial (2021): a series of one-to-one participatory tele-synaesthesia performances, where I became a virtual aesthetician and performed ‘virtual facial care’ on Zoom amid the second wave of the pandemic in the United Kingdom. In this article, I will discuss how tele-synaesthesia performance could trigger tactile experiences in the participants in reference to Michel Foucault’s concept Heterotopia (1986) that allegorically address the incompatible physical places in the society. I discuss how to elicit an affective sensory response from non-tactile senses through virtual touch, as stated by Naomi Bennett’s ‘Telematic connections: sensing, feeling, being in space together’ (2020). I refer to Legacy Russell’s discussion on glitch (2020) to analyse the possible future of tele-synaesthesia performance and its potential for expanding virtual connectivity with an ethical touch of a non-performative refusal of the present.

Sharing food, vulnerability and intimacy in a global pandemic: The digital art of the Chinese diaspora in Europe

This article examines the digital artworks created by three Chinese diaspora artists based in Europe: Berlin-based queer filmmaker Fan Popo’s short digital video Lerne Deutsch in meiner Küche (‘Learn German in my kitchen’), London-based performance artist Zeng Burong’s performance Non-Taster and London-based writer David K. S. Tse’s digital radio play The C Word. All three artworks were created in 2020 during the pandemic and all deal explicitly with the issues of anti-Asian racism and cross-cultural understanding. All these artworks also engage with issues of food and culinary practices. Through an analysis of the three artworks, I suggest that making digital art about food can serve as a creative and culturally sensitive strategy to engage with pandemic politics. Indeed, in an era of rising nationalism and international antagonism, diasporic Chinese artists have turned to seemingly mundane, apolitical and non-confrontational ways such as creating digital artworks about food to engage with the public about important social and political issues. This functions as a creative and culturally sensitive strategy to conduct social and political activism and to enhance cross-cultural understanding. It also showcases the political potential and social relevance of digital art for a pandemic and even a post-pandemic world.

Pandemic, censorship and creative protests via grassroots visual mobilization

In early 2020, Chinese people engaged in several rounds of extraordinary online campaigns in response to the government’s handling of the outbreak of coronavirus. During these campaigns, visual images played a crucial role in facilitating netizens to inform each other, escape official censoring machinery, express anger and frustration, excavate truth, document reality and mobilize online support and protest. In particular, images related with Dr Li Wenliang, one of whistle-blowers of the soon-to-be pandemic who himself died of the virus, and Dr Ai Fen, the first doctor to share information about a possible coronavirus diagnose among her colleagues, became the focal points of the unprecedented online mobilization successively. Millions of netizens participated in the effort to circulate these images (and stories behind them) and invented ingenious ways to continue the endeavour when confronted by the heightened censorship. Various art communities and individuals have done their share to fuel in this momentum of visual mobilization and there was a surge of call for public participation in responding to the pandemic through participatory public artworks. Maskbook, initiated by artist Wen Fang, and One More Day led by MeDoc, are two exemplary cases. Through analysing these images, this article discusses China’s grassroots visual mobilization to claim for freedom of speech and access to truth in the wake of the massive health crisis and articulates its contribution to the formation of a bottom-up visual discourse that challenges the state’s media discourse in interpreting the pandemic as a victory of government leadership.

COVID-19 and viral anti-Asian racism: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of memes and the racialization of the COVID-19 pandemic

This article examines how internet memes both enacted and reproduced racialization of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were motivated to undertake this work by a surge in hatred towards and violence against people with East Asian heritage following the outbreak of COVID-19. We focus on memes because of their ubiquity in contemporary culture and their capacity to both reflect and shape discourses. We conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis of two prominent memes – juxtaposing a ‘top-down’ process of meme selection and distribution (the sharing of ‘The Kung-Flu Kid’ meme on Instagram by Donald Trump Jr) with a ‘bottom-up’ process (the ‘Corona-chan’ meme that originated on the website 4chan). We situate our study in a growing literature on politicized memes, challenging an emerging consensus that lauds ‘bottom-up’ memes as a democratizing force enabling resistance to hegemony, inequality and injustice. While we do not reject this characterization outright, we add nuance, showing that racialized memetic discourses around COVID-19 were propagated both from the top-down and from the bottom-up. We conclude that memes are particularly powerful communicative tools in racialized discourse because their use of polysemy, humour and cultural reference allows them to subvert the mechanisms that sanction openly racist statements.

The nearby: A scope of seeing

The world during the COVID-19 pandemic became more divided than united, both between states and among individuals. Opinions are polarized partly because, as I have observed in urban China, the public is simultaneously preoccupied by the very near (the self) and the very far (the imagined ‘world’), but neglect the space in between, and as a result fail to recognize how the social world is concretely constituted through interconnected differences. This article advocates a way of perceiving the world by taking ‘the nearby’ (fujin in Chinese) as a central scope. The nearby is a lived space where one encounters people with diverse backgrounds on a regular basis. The nearby brings different positions into one view, thus constituting a ‘scope’ of seeing. Such a scope enables nuanced understandings of reality and facilitates new social relations and actions. The nearby could form a line of resistance against the power of the state, capital and technology, that is turning local communities into units of administrative control and value extraction. This article calls for a ‘First Mile Movement’, in which artists, researchers and activists work together to help facilitate citizens with the construction of their nearby as a basis for reflecting upon life experiences, testing grand ideologies and engaging in public discussion.

Pericoronial writing from China and the diaspora

This article analyses what Margaret Atwood calls the literature of ‘ustopia’. The portmanteau term brings together the utopia and dystopia categories because Atwood argues that one contains the germ of the other. Ustopian writing is a body of work that is helpful when it comes to understanding current destruction to lives and livelihoods, and imagining our post-coronavirus future. The present article thus explores four works of ustopian writing from China and the diaspora, three of them having been written before the current COVID-19 crisis but all shedding light on it. Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary (2020) represents the first real work of postcoronial literature in what seems likely to be an outpouring over the coming years. It is anticipated very ably by the precoronial texts also analysed here – Mo Yan’s Frog ([2009] 2014), Ma Jian’s China Dream (2018) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) – which presage the post-COVID dispensation. Taken together, they form a body of work that the article terms pericoronial writing.