Mao goes pop online: Game art worlds in China

Among the most significant examples of new media art in China to first receive critical attention are those that tend towards re-engineering early video games while riffing off on aspects of the 1990s’ ‘political pop’ movement. Are these works the product of, or interventions into, the current parameters established for Chinese media, political censorship and game worlds? How might they reflect the fault lines of the growing interest in networked cultures and participatory media in contemporary art and in general? Through personal vignettes and playful moments, this article argues that one of the politico-cultural implications of the Mao Goes Pop art movement going digital concerns the link between digital art’s ‘precarious playbour’, the rise of gaming in Asia, and emergent techno-Orientalist discourses about media art and technologies in China. Since the 1990s, game art by Feng Mengbo (b. 1966) and other artists is introspective of not only the transnational art world but of global media convergence as well.