Memes, Puns, and Selfies: A Look at the Chinese Internet

Writer, critic, artist and technologist An Xiao Mina has designed an interactive program that will explore the visual culture of the Chinese Internet. First, she will lead a panel of artists and researchers including Xiaowei Wang and Samantha Culp in the exploration of Chinese digital culture with a focus on creative forms of expression through words and images. Attendees will also participate in a calligraphy workshop meant to offer a hands-on exploration of Chinese-language Internet puns, sourced by Beijing-based artist Ma Yongfeng.
Organized in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition, 28 Chinese, the program aims to provide insight into Chinese digital culture, which influences and inspires many creative professionals today, as well as the broader public.
About the organizer: An “An Xiao” Mina is co-founder of The Civic Beat, a creative collective and online magazine looking at issues of global justice, creativity and technology. In the tech sector, Mina works at Meedan, where they are building a platform for social translation of social media.
Mina has spoken at venues like the Personal Democracy Forum, Creative Mornings and the Aspen Institute, and she has contributed writing to publications like the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Journal of Visual Culture. She was a 2013 fellow at the USC Annenberg / Getty Arts Journalism Program and serves as contributing editor to Hyperallergic and the Civicist. Having recently served as a section editor for Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters (published by MIT Press and Tate Publishing), she is currently working on a book about Internet memes and global social movements.