Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 11

© 2022 Global Journals Volume XXII Issue XI Version I 13 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 A Battlegrounds. Net Art and Virtual Worlds in the Work of Chinese Artists Seemingly frivolous and free-form, the artist's animations address important issues in contemporary China, such as the social transformation, comsumptionism, and ecological destruction. Savage Growth (2008), for example, tells the story of a Pioneer woman struggling against urbanisation. We move with her from an idealistic world full of friendly and beautiful creatures to a 'nightmarish world of cities that never stop growing, like mutating cancerous cells ' 12 . Resistance becomes impossible. The consequences of this imbalance between civilisational development and nature, in turn, are illustrated by the flash animation LV Forest (2010). Being "more nightmare than fairy- tale" 13 shows a world of excess, inequality and intolerance. In the film, we follow the figure of a naked girl dancing amidst accumulated possessions, riding triumphantly on skeletal monsters, and during a violent fight with other women on the streets of a phantasmagorical city. Quintessential to both the style and content of the artist's message is a monumental silk wall carpet, measuring 200 x 300 cm, under the title Brave Diligent ( 2014). It depicts the Young Pioneer Woman standing at the top of a mountain, in the rays of the setting sun, taking up arms against an approaching plane symbolising industrialisation. Her image is framed by chrysanthemums, signifying longevity in Chinese tradition, as well as cranes, magpies, phoenixes and other mystical birds. The artist's alter ego attempts to save the world she has created (read: desired) from annihilation. By accompanying her, we want it to succeed. IV. U topia as a N ew R eality Not much younger than Bu Hua, Cao Fei (b. 1978, Guangzhou) grapples with similar issues in her work. In order to address issues such as identity or ecology safely and beyond censorship, they both create alternative universes. According to art historian Luise Guise, who researched and interviewed dozens of Chinese women artists for five years, she states that: "These are artists [Bu Hua and Cao Fei] who have little or no first-hand experience of the tragedy and bitterness of the Cultural Revolution, growing up during a period in which an isolationist Cold War mentality gradually collapsed. They are generally not making work about democratic freedoms, despite what some western commentators might wish and expect Chinese artists to do. They do, however, make reference in their work to the issues that concern them: from materialism and urbanisation to environmental degradation; from sexuality and motherhood to the impact of 12 Luise Guest, Half the Sky: Women Artists in China , Piper Press 2016, p. 15. 13 White Rabbit. Contemporary Chinese Art Collection, https://explore. dangrove.org/objects/470 biotechnologies on the human body. Many are deeply interested in a revival of spiritual ity , in particular the traditions of Buddhism and Taoism" 14 . In 2006, Cao Fei made the video Whose Utopia 15 , showing workers at the Osram light bulb factory in Guangzhou. We see them not at their traditional workplaces, but playing out their dream life roles/occupations. Most of them are so-called 'itinerant workers' who have lost their citizenship rights after leaving their home village in search of income opportunities. Often working beyond the norm, without health care or other labour privileges. It is difficult, therefore, not to read this work as a critical commentary on China's overly rapid urbanisation and the legal changes that did not follow in parallel. It certainly became the impetus for the artist's subsequent long- term and intertwined projects Second Life and RMB City, created in collaboration with Vitamin Creative Space since 2007 . In both, she creates virtual worlds, imitating a contemporary Chinese city with its advantages and disadvantages. Within the former, she creates an avatar - an idealised version of herself named China Tracy. Her adventures in an alternative, parallel universe (on the virtual platform Second Life) were documented using technology specific to computer gaming. Their course was then publicly traceable for the first time by viewing the work i.MIRROR - A Second Life Documentary Film by China Tracy in the China Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The work was presented, inside a cloud-like tent in the garden of the pavilion, which was further intended to introduce the audience to a space different from the everyday. The aim of this procedure, but also of the entire installation, was to blur the boundary between fiction and reality, between documentary and fantasy, between the virtual and the material dawn. This was to further emphasise the illusion of the utopia of the created worlds, for as Luise Guest aptly commented on this work, "Despite the apparent freedom of the art ist 's avatar there is a sense of isolation and detachment 16 ". Ironically, although we create ideal virtual realities, we also make the same human mistakes in their spaces. "(...) Perhaps no longer important to draw the line between the virtual and the Real as the border between the two Has been blurred. In the virtual land, we are no t what we originally are, and yet we remain unchanged 17 ", commented the artist herself. 14 Luise Guest, Half the Sky: Women Artists in China, Piper Press 2016, p. 15. 15 For more on this work Whose Utopia see Monica Merlin, Cao Fei: Rethinking the global/local discipleship, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Vol. 5, No. 1, 2018, pp. 41-60. 16 Luise Guest, Half the Sky: Women Artists in China , Piper Press 2016, p. 28. 17 Christina Penetsdorfer, Cao Fei. In Stepping out! Female identities in Chinese Contemporary Art, eds. Nils Ohlsen, Kunstforeningen GL STRAND 2022, p. 102.