Internal hypertopias: A trope in the contemporary Chinese postinternet art of the moving image

Abstract

Abstract This paper maps out several contemporary Chinese artists whose work of the moving image, be it installation, on mobile phones, on the app or website, is read as responding to the situation where various screens and their corresponding images or information are connected so deeply as to blur their previously established ontological and cultural boundaries. To this end, I expand Francesco Casetti’s idea of ‘hypertopia’, a new spatial structure in which cinema is unhinged from its traditional place and relocated into other places and platforms, through Hito Steyerl’s assertion on the migration of images and data, into, across, and off screens in the postinternet condition under which the world is perceived as the sum of the images and data themselves. If Casetti’s hypertopia points to cinema’s centrifugal relocation to other spaces than the movie theater, it can be argued that Steyerl’s insight into the postinternet condition concerns the centripetal folding of images and screens, including the cinematic, into a screen, so that it is seen as accommodating them in its inside. Developing this theoretical speculation, I characterize as ‘internal hypertopia’ an aesthetic trope of moving image pieces by such artists as aaajiao (aka Xu Wenkai) and Miao Ying.