Shanzhai Secrets 

2019
For Akademie Schloss Solitude/ZKM’s web residency

At Shanzhai Secrets, virtual objects are for sale in a space parallel to Huaqiangbei Electronics Market in Shenzhen. These objects encode censored messages and materials into iconically “Chinese” objects: mahjong tiles, a blue and white ceramic vase, a knock off cellphone. Such virtual objects may be re-circulated through messaging or massive online multiplayer worlds.

Shanzhai Secrets draws upon the phenomenon of “shanzhai” or copycat culture, which takes objects and relentlessly remixes and subverts them into new forms of hardware and material goods. Shanzhai is open source on hyperspeed, a trickster approach to copyright, a middle finger to copyright regimes and intellectual property.

The objects are positioned as both playful ways of bypassing automated censorship as well muted objects of history, like funerary reliquaries. Within the Shanzhai Secrets retail context, they draw out the irony and futility of bypassing censorship: that information becomes commodified, into objects, into the realm of consumption as politics. As words and histories become erased under authoritarian capitalism, any attempted fix only serves to propagate further consumption and shopping. A future where a person can only read the past through wandering the glittering aisles of Huaqiangbei market, buying knock-off items, purchasing an old cellphone for novelty’s sake, only to accidentally discover news images and articles they have never seen before...

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