WEAR Journal, published and produced by HomeShop Beijing, is now out! I have a four-page graphic essay which I developed with the amazing art historian Orianna Cacchione, who’s posing above. Here’s more about the journal’s theme this year: WEAR journal finally arrives to its third issue in spartan outfit: double-pleated, DIY and pretty much naked. Following [...]
Some two years ago, in the spring of 2010, Jennifer Ng and I founded Bird’s Nest: Ai Weiwei in English, with a great deal of help from a number of volunteer designers and translators (including our brilliant anonymous designer Fat Sun who set up the two-column format). What started as an experiment in collaborative translation [...]
There’s a new article in The Atlantic looking at China’s political and social memes, and I’m quoted alongside fellow internet culture researchers Cole Stryker and Kate Miltner: “Because of the strictures on speech in China, memes tend to be a really effective way to spread a political message,” An Xiao Mina, artist, meme expert and [...]
I have a new essay out in The Atlantic looking at the remarkable parallels between the Trayvon Martin hoodie meme and the Chen Guangcheng sunglasses meme, which arose independently in their respective internets: From the outset, the stories of Trayvon Martin and Chen Guangcheng couldn’t have seemed more different. One, a young black man shot [...]
Political memes have been on my mind as of late. It started with ROFLCon at MIT and moved on to more discussions, Skype chats and journal entries. And I’ve just returned from the Personal Democracy Forum at NYU. Been a bit of a whirlwind as I travel around the country but seeing as I’ve lived [...]
Real name registration went into effect last week in many Chinese cities. Tricia Wang and I have penned a new op-ed for Wired that looks at why this is such a big deal: In a move to exert greater control on citizen speech online, the government is requiring that Sina Weibo and China’s other microblogs [...]
I was recently honored with an invitation to join the advisory board for Prix Ars Electronica 2012, focusing on the Digital Communities section. Prix Ars Electronica, part of the larger Ars Electronica umbrella, is the prestigious award ceremony for new media based in Linz, Austria. Here’s what their Digital Communities section looks at: The “Digital [...]
Ethan Zuckerman just published an interesting post about the importance of studying Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging tool in China. He references WeiboScope, a very useful and informative tool put out by the University of Hong Kong to help visualize the popular trending topics on Sina Weibo, one of China’s leading microblog services (there are [...]
Two social media-related events these past few weeks in Beijing. I’ve spoken about social media art and done social media art in a few countries now, but China always presents the most potent site for exploration. I gave a talk at the Maker’s Carnival, a festival of making in partnership with UNESCO, Qinghua University, Shanghai [...]
It’s difficult to underestimate the importance of the mingpian (名片), or business card, in Asian culture. Literally, “mingpian” means “name card”, and people carry different cards for different needs. It’s not necessarily about business: with a stack of 500 cards going for less than 20 USD, it’s an expected investment. In Japan and Korea, it’s [...]