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China Art by Phone: Mobile Movies

Jia ZhangKe's film Platform gives crystalline shape to a generation in a group of youth gathered around a tape-recorder in Fenyang city. The tape itself had come from Guangzhou and before that, presumably, from across the border with Hong Kong. Perhaps a Cantonese filtering, a local expression of Western and brand-name product that, viewed positively, marks the largest and most sweeping educational drive in China's history, the distribution and assimilation of fashion, DVDs, CDs, video, and design. This article seeks to know empirically the conditions that lay the groundwork for this educational drive, focusing on social transformation and the impact of digital technologies on theory, approach, practice, consumption. Clearly, mobility is important in this process of social transformation. Platform gives us images of the mobility of people, things, and ideas. This article also looks at the effects of the transport of people, things, and ideas and explores the cultural dimensions of social transformation. The article asks: What is mobility for artists and media producers? What are the urbanistic interconnections that emerge from an engagement with public space? These questions are explored around the social and cultural terrain of the mobile phone. The article considers the virtual public space of the mobile telephone now opening to cultural producers and consumers. In what way does the mobile telephone, as an instrument for dialogue, a marketing device, and a promotional tool, affect our perception of public space? This article examines several initiatives that bring the mobile phone and cultural production together. One of these is titled “Focus: This Moment,” a program of eight short films by eight contemporary Chinese film directors made for mobile phone and Internet distribution. Another is “Connect to Art,” initiated by Nokia in September 2004 in Helsinki, continued in Monaco in December 2004, and then furthered again in Shanghai in May 2006 with the unveiling of four works by Chinese contemporary artists: Ai Weiwei, Yang Fudong, Zhang Peili, and Feng Mengbo. The article considers how mobile phone movies modify and enrich our understanding of cinema. This is thus an enquiry into the impact of digital technology on the mature film industry. Furthermore, the article asks how public space is enfolded in multiple contextual discourses that create the mobility and interface of the mobile phone.