Bu Hua’s art originated among a Chinese subculture of online digital artists, and more specifically of young people who create animated works using often pirated Adobe Flash software, then upload these works to websites where they can be shared and viewed by a community of peers. Certainly this kind of thing happens everywhere, but in China, Internet communities have some unique properties, and we are not just talking about the Great Firewall.
In terms of both the size of their databases and bandwidth, China’s two biggest sites for streaming video, TuDou.com and YouKu.com, are both much, much larger than YouTube, “the world’s most famous” video sharing site. In 2007, it was estimated that TuDou.com alone streamed 15 billion minutes of video every day, compared to just 3 billion minutes a day for YouTube. Because Chinese youth have much less buying power and mobility then Western Internet users, these sites form an even more viable and important “third channel” for the Chinese public, or in other words, an alternative network to television and film, which are controlled – not just in China, but everywhere – by governments and/or corporations.
Homegrown Flash animation may just account for a fraction of the content on China’s giant video sites, but more focused communities do continue to exist on other websites like flash8.net and flashempire.com. Bu Hua posted many of her early works on a special area for Flash animation on the China Internet portal Tom.com, which was then very popular. Over the years, she’s used both Tom.com and other online communities to help her work find an audience. Recently, since she has become regarded as an artist, she has however stopped posting works online, showing them mainly through exhibitions and film festivals. She does however continue to post news on her website, Buhua.com, as well as blog posts, short fiction, oil paintings, sketches and other works in various media. However it is her digital works, including animations and digital drawings, that form the most distinctive part of her oeuvre.
In Bu Hua’s digital art, we encounter two defining elements. First, there is the cartoonish figure of a school girl in the uniform of blue skirt and white blouse, with a red ribbon around her neck and sometimes smoking a cigarette. This is Bu Hua’s alter ego, a bad-girl princess who lives in and explores a virtual world. Second, there is the virtual world itself. This is a carefully constructed fantasy world that pits an architecture of magical abundance against a population of bizarre, and often troubled beings. It is a world that constantly shifts between polar opposites: on one hand, there is a paradise of luxury goods and Chinese palace architecture, and on the other there is a black-skied, dystopian realm inspired by industrial China. Bu Hua describes this world, saying, “Basically it 's what you might call the different phases of my own psychic world. The scenes are wild, nostalgic and surreal. They express feelings and states of mind from real life.”
Born in 1973, Bu Hua belongs to a generation of Chinese artists that experienced the economic growth and new material comforts of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening policies rather than the economic hardships their parents experienced during the rule of Mao Zedong. Her father was an artist who made woodcut prints, and under his encouragement, in 1991 she entered the Graduate Institute of Fine Arts at Tsinghua University, one of Beijing’s best known universities. Then in 1997 and 1998, she spent a year studying art in the Netherlands. Her career as an artist began taking off two years ago after an important Shanghai-based curator, Jiang Qing, included one of her works in a traveling exhibition of young artists called “Infantization.” Since then, she’s exhibited in numerous international exhibitions, including the 2008 Shanghai Biennial and 2008 Busan Biennial. In 2009 she created a music video for the Chinese rock singer Zuoxiao Zuzhou, and this year she was commissioned to create work for the Pavilion of the Future at Expo 2010 Shanghai.
Bu Hua began experimenting with Flash animation in 2001, when the software was still only around five years old. Flash was developed by the American software company Macromedia as a way of creating small files that could stream animation or video over the Internet, and Flash technology would eventually make sites like YouTube possible. Macromedia’s computer drawing tools encourage bold outlines and flat color areas. Like the woodblock prints created by Bu Hua’s father, it is a very graphic medium, and Bu Hua combined both influences as she began making her own web-based cartoons.
Her first big hit was Cat (2003), an animation which got both web hits and berths at international film festivals. The story is basically that of Orpheus and Eurydice, only here it is the child cat who travels to the land of the dead to bring back his slain mother. Unlike the Greek myth, however, there is a happy ending. Orpheus was told not to look back until he reached the land of the living, and a turn of the head cast his lover back to hell for eternity. The child cat however manages a successful and joyous reunion. Two other works, A Seed’s Journey (2004) and The Sick City (2005) also used short animations to tell of epic journeys, and in both hardship yields to happiness.
This sort of blessed adventure, and a belief in the possibility of worldly happiness, is thread that runs through all of Bu Hua’s art. In many ways, this belief also goes hand in hand with her use of Internet technologies, which she optimistically believes present an opportunity for personal freedom. In an email interview I conducted with her last year, in preparation for a special screening program of her work at the art fair Art Taipei, she declared, “For the new generation, [the Internet] has changed the nature of our place on earth.” She then went on to say, “My take on life is that the thing I 'm really after is freedom. Making ‘art’ is the best route for taking me there, and using Flash is one of the best routes to making ‘art’ I 've found. In the end, everything is about states of mind. But independence is not the same as freedom. There are many people who are independent, but few who are free. So what does it mean for a person to be free? My answer is simple: To fear nothing is to be free. And the companion of freedom is true happiness.”
The figure of the school girl first appeared in Bu Hua’s work in 2005, in the animation “Oneness.” In an exhibition statement, Bu Hua once described her as “half myself and half ideal figure.” Unlike Bu Hua’s earlier works, the little girl witnesses situations but never acts as a character in any narrative. The girl is at once an explorer, a resident and a voyeur in her own virtual world, a paradise overshadowed by the dark circumstances of a world that seeps in from outside the computer – one we could perhaps call reality. In Youth Does Harm to Health (2007), she roams through surreal masses of disembodied legs who populate an industrial city. In Savage Growth (2008), she witnesses both skyscrapers sprouting like mushrooms and an arms race of birds with jet fighter engines. And in Anxiety (2009), she watches as man-made black spaces literally flood over natural greenery. Though the images are dark, they are also playful dark and deeply surreal. There are spitting penis monsters that stand like ostriches; Colonel Sanders watches a Chinese acrobat perched on the back of a tiger and juggling with his feet; and a leaf monster dances to techno music and shoots out flowers.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once argued that the stronger our notion of the real, the more we find ourselves separated from it. To make a quick analogy, we could perhaps say that reality TV programs do more to confuse us about reality than they do to help us understand it. Bu Hua however is not hung up on reality, because she’s opted to understand it from the safety of the virtual. In an overpowering world, this kind of symbolic mastery of the real, when it takes place on a personal level, is a strategy for survival. And this is where Bu Hua has found freedom and a measure of happiness. Writing about her animation Last Phases of the Future (2007), Bu Hua notes that that the girl “has a gorgeous island as her ‘home’ and…she even has her own sun. After swimming in the pool at the bottom of her island, she can dry and warm herself with her own sunshine.”
“It is a metaphor for independence and completeness, to stand alone,” she continues. “She is able to enjoy solitude, the eternal theme in life.”
By David Frazier
