Censorship

Infinite Escape

In this interactive project, I created a series of digital paintings in Procreate and vibe-coded escape and trap scenes into a continuous zoom-out. Inspired by research reverse-engineering Chinese censorship, I realized that each step toward a breakthrough may lead further into a trap already anticipated by censors. Using a joystick, viewers experience the frustration of a freedom that never arrives as apparent escape opens onto darker frames. This frustration suggests that understanding how we are manipulated matters more than anger.

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The Wailing Wall

This interactive work brings to the surface words censors routinely erase. Inspired by China’s “Wailing Wall”, the comments on Dr. Li Wenliang’s final Weibo post, I used Procreate to visualize this virtual refuge as a graffiti wall. Dr. Li was a COVID whistleblower reprimanded by Wuhan police for “spreading rumors,” who later died from COVID-19. His tears contain comments I selected. Using the mouse, viewers wipe away his tears with a towel, erasing the words within and becoming both comforters and censors. Does this gesture soothe sorrow, or silence real sorrows that need healing?

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Buried Voices

Built with AI-assisted coding, this interactive website brings to light strikers’ own accounts of the Canton-Hong Kong Strike of 1925–26. I turned historical photographs of protesters’ raised arms into protest placards, with experiences collected from their memoirs on the back. They capture a contrast that struck me: official accounts hail a glorious national movement, while many strikers recount job losses, forced military service, partisan coercion, and unmet demands. This piece beckons viewers to see past rewritten histories and redacted archives.

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Ethnicity of Numbers

This piece depicts Xinjiang’s “Becoming Family” campaign, where Han officials stayed in Uyghur homes as “relatives,” ostensibly promoting unity while conducting surveillance. I used CapCut’s smart masks and p5.js color recognition to fill faces and bodies with researched statistics corresponding to each identity. Viewers click the numbers to reveal their context. Watcher and watched, majority and minority, powerful and powerless belong to the same “Ethnicity of Numbers”: humans dehumanized, reduced to tools for maintaining “social stability” and meeting numerical targets.

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Debate Factory

Drawn and compiled in Procreate, this animation imagines a factory that compresses living beings and objects into strings of numbers. Based on debate evidence I have encountered, it reflects how some debaters become “big number hunters,” craving large statistics that give them an edge in impact weighing. Deaths from nuclear weapons, soaring insulin prices, crimes enabled by money laundering, and African child deaths following aid freezes become sources of excitement in research. I used somber gray tones to convey this numbness. Debate should deepen our understanding of reality, not numb us to what’s behind the numbers.

The Nested 404 Bins

This humorous, vibe-coded interactive archive mocks censors’ futile efforts at thorough content moderation. Its desktop is tiled with 404-ed WeChat articles I collected. Viewers play censors by dragging articles into the bin, yet clicking it restores them in a deeper archive. The nested structure and darkening backgrounds reflect increasingly systematic resistance: documentation that outlasts erasure and technologies that outpace censorship. This piece explores how, however opaque socio-political problems may seem, resilience and methods can still find ways through them.

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