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本帖最后由 满仓 于 2011-11-3 13:12 编辑
【中文标题】哐哐哐和空椅子 － 互联网幽默已经不仅仅是幽默了
【原文标题】Where an Internet Joke Is Not Just a Joke
【登载媒体】纽约时报
【原文作者】BROOK LARMER
【原文链接】http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/the-dangerous-politics-of-internet-humor-in-china.html?_r=1&ref=china
手机轻轻的震动起来，微弱的声音消失在四白落地的艺术家工作室中。那是四月初的一天早晨，王波起初并没有在意这个来电，这位互联网动画制作人被网络上大批拥趸所熟知的名字是“皮三”。他本来不想被其它事情打扰。皮三今年40岁，留着短短的头发，加上一对弯弯的眉毛，让他看起来总是一副困惑的表情。他最为人称道的作品是一个叫做“哐哐”的顽皮卡通人物形象，但他的主要收入来源还是为其它公司制作动画产品。今天，他有一份作品的交期就要到了。皮三骑着自行车来到位于北京郊外一个废弃工厂改造的工作室中，期望能不受打扰地完成当天的工作，但手机的嗡嗡声一直响个不停。
皮三一接起电话，对方立即告诉他一件新闻：公安局刚刚逮捕了著名的当代艺术家和政府批判人士艾未未。皮三脱口而出一句粗话。过去6个星期里，数百位网络博客写手——律师、活动家、记者——在几十年来最大规模的突击行动中，纷纷被警方拘留。现在，他们又抓走了艾这位身材肥胖、国际知名的人士。如果艾都被逮捕了，中国的独立思考人士还安全吗？
皮三的确有理由害怕，他和艾是朋友。几个星期之前，两位艺术家在午餐时曾经讨论在一部互联网动画片中合作。皮三尽管对艾激进的网络行为心怀戒备，但他仰慕他在纽约、柏林和伦敦开办独立展览的勇气。最近一次展览中，艾在泰特现代美术馆的地板上铺满了1亿颗瓷瓜子，并邀请参观者走在上面。有些人认为，这些瓜子代表了被践踏的中国人民。
尽管心怀恐惧，皮三还是立即在新浪微博——类似于推特，世界增长速度最快的互联网平台，受中国政府的严密监控——上贴出了这条消息。仅仅几秒钟之后，不明身份的人就将其删除。他于是贴上了一副没有任何说明的艾的卡通漫画，这是绕过中国敏感字过滤软件的最好方法。但图片也很快消失了——这表示删除图片的不是电脑软件，而是人。皮三在微博上说：“我再一次被和谐了，那仅仅是一张图片。”
于是，富有创造性的头脑开始发威了。皮三后来对我说：“我必须要做点事情解除自己的恐惧，别人或许会写文章来抗议，我的武器是动画。”他和一位同事彻夜未眠，狂热地制作出一部54秒的动画片，题目是《克瓜子》。故事发生在哐哐的学校，一个小女孩坐在演播室里，说：“以前有个中国人卖瓜子。”突然，一直黑色的大手把她抓走了。后边几个战战兢兢的播讲人试图完成这个故事，但是那只黑手也把他们一个个抓走，速度一个比一个快。
最后轮到哐哐了，这孩子嗯嗯啊啊了半天，放弃了发言，气愤地一声叹息“哎”。片子中显示的中国字“哎”几乎和艾未未的姓一样。哐哐也被抓走了，发出一声尖叫。下一个镜头中，黑手把一堆组成“哎”字的瓜子也抓走了。然后传来一个刺耳的声音——牙齿咬在瓷瓜子上，一个画外音喊道：“他妈的！谁做的假瓜子啊？”
《克瓜子》
皮三在4月4日黎明前完成了这部动画，离艾被捕还不到24个小时。他对我说：“在把它发布到网络上之前，我犹豫了一下。但是我又想，如果我不让它面世，就是于是在自裁。”他于是把“克瓜子”发布到中国最大的视频网站的上。几个小时之内，有超过100万人观看了这部动画片。之后，就像动画片中的演播者一样，它在中国的网站上一个接一个地消失了。皮三在微博上怒斥监察机构“皇上不急太监急”，没有任何人回应。在愤怒中，皮三也在想，那只黑手会不会也来抓他。
世界上没有任何一个政府像中国一样在互联网巡逻工作上倾注如此巨大的力量，5万人的监察部队和覆盖范围极广的先进过滤软件，在5亿互联网用户身上搜索不喜欢的内容和潜在的歹徒。尽管存在这些限制——或许恰恰是因为存在着限制——互联网在中国充斥着最富机智的内容。北京大学副教授、互联网专家胡勇说：“监控制度让我们处处受制，但它也孕育出超凡的想象力。人们不得不发明一些间接的方法来表达他们的想法，幽默就像一种自然界的密码发挥着作用。”
为了躲避监察，中国网民已经变成了喜剧词汇的大师，他们把自己的观点披上若干层讽刺和嘲弄的外衣。这不是一个新发明，但是它发展的趋势如此磅礴，已经成为了中国互联网的一种特质。暗语已经变成了主流文化，这种极富传播性的行为直接触及了那些人们具有广泛共识，而又不可以公开讨论的话题，从腐败和经济发展不平衡到监察制度本身。加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校的助理教授肖强说：“除了其内在的喜剧价值，这种幽默表示网民在探究政府的底限。”他的网站“中国数字时代”收集了许多具有娱乐性的互联网词汇。“再没有什么比这种语言更能体现中国社会的压迫点了。”
这种粗鄙的次文化现象是如此的流行，以至于中国人都为它起了个名字“恶搞”，意思是“邪恶的行为”，或者更粗俗一些“顽皮的嘲弄”。恶搞采取了极为简单的方式讽刺当权者，又不至于过分反叛。胡锦涛主席最喜欢挂在嘴边上的一个词“和谐”经常被用来敦促社会稳定的状态，现在则被反过来描述监察制度。比如说“我的博客被和谐了”。6月4日是1989年×××纪念日，被说成是5月35日，或者535。也有相当复杂的恶搞方式，比如胡戈在2010年的影片《动物世界》里，讲述互联网用户作为一个罕见物种从“强迫性思考紊乱症”中被拯救出来，意指思想自由。
大部分情况下，讽刺是政府勉强默许的一种公众情绪安全阀。毕竟，博人一笑比上街抗议要好。但是，就像Orwell在缅甸担任殖民地警官期间所发现的，被嘲笑也会引发统治者的激烈反应。去年，一名妇女因为发表了三个字的推特言论而被判处劳教一年，中国政府似乎严重缺乏幽默感，而让别人为此付出代价。温云超是一位敢于捍卫言论自由的网络写手，经常参加互联网的各种恶搞活动。他说：“嘲弄滥用职权行为的笑话不仅仅是人们发泄的方式，它还可以激励人们的情绪。每一个笑话都在削弱专制政府的所谓权威。”
横扫互联网的讽刺行为就像一场大火，起因早已被火灾掩盖。但是在每一个活动的背后，都有一些人在探索个人言论的界限，通常是危险地在允许和禁止之间模糊的界限上行走、嬉戏。过去几个月中，我一直在追随着两个人——动画制作人皮三和博客写手温云超，试图更深层次地了解在中国数字前线上发生的“恶搞”和愈加白热化的猫捉老鼠的游戏现状。
皮三和温是截然相反的两种人，一个是北方人，另一个是南方人，他们从不同角度诠释着“恶搞”的定义。一个擅长视觉图像，另一个擅长文字工具。皮三对于活动分子的称号避之唯恐不及，他把讽刺看作是发泄个人沮丧情绪的艺术手段。温则骄傲地给自己贴上活动分子的标签，他认为幽默是用来唤醒民权社会的“弱者的武器”。当政府加强镇压行动的时候，两个人都被迫重新思考自己对危险和机会的理解，在越过那条看不见的界限之前，他们能走多远？
让温领会到互联网幽默真实力量的并不是一些笑话，而是来自警察审讯室的一声呼救。2009年7月初的一天早晨，39岁的温在位于南方城市广州的家中起床后，发现他的推特中有一条让他震惊的消息：“我被马尾警方逮捕了，救命。”这条消息来自他的一个年轻的朋友、博客写手郭宝峰。马尾是沿海城市厦门的一个地区，离这里300多英里。几分钟之后，郭又发了一条推特信息，也是用英文：“快来救我，我趁警察睡觉时拿到了手机。”
之后，就再无声息了。
温知道，人们随随便便地就会消失在中国的牢狱迷宫之中。25岁的郭是英语翻译，他转帖一个视频，其中一位强奸案受害者的母亲控诉厦门当局掩盖罪行的事件。温在想，警方还有什么手段来阻止信息的传播。
来自审讯室的推特，以及后来的悄无声息，让温极为不安。但是他能做什么呢？即使人们克服了内心的恐惧，任何形式的抗议也都会被立即压制。他突然想到了网络上相当流行的一句话：“贾君鹏，你妈喊你回家吃饭！”
这句话的起源已经无法考证，但是网民都把它看作是对网络成瘾的一代人的调侃——迷失在虚拟世界，与外界失去联系。那一天，数百万网民疯狂地传递这句话。而温又把它赋予了新意义。他要求博客中的数万名粉丝给马尾派出所寄明信片，并把照片传到网络上，所有明信片中只写一句话：“郭宝峰，你妈喊你回家吃饭！”
没有人能了解互联网行动是否真能产生实际效果。但是，在4个同样转帖这个视频的人分别被判处1到2年监禁的背景下，郭并没有迷失在牢狱之中，而是在16天后被释放了。对温来说，这件事让他的想法变成了现实。他对我说：“幽默可以放大社会媒体的力量，如果它能真正触及痛处，比如司法不公或滥用职权，它会具有强大的感染力。它不是直接的——仅仅是一个笑话，对吗——所以人们就不用担心受牵连。”
温生长在广东省一个贫困的农村家庭，是家里最大的孩子。他早先对参与社会工作并不感兴趣。1989年×××时，温还是一个爱逃课的中学生，他拥护政府的镇压行动：“我赞同政府的行为，必须要制止混乱的蔓延。”温的大学在中国冰冷的北方城市哈尔滨的一所技术学院，学习机械锻造。他在大学期间最大胆的行为，就是偷运一些广东话的色情杂志和流行音乐，来度过漫长的冬天。
按他自己的话说，他的互联网“觉醒”是几年之后在广州附近一座发电厂工作时发生的事情。一天晚上下班之后，温看到了一个香港电视台的节目，那是一个与官方报道完全相反的1989年事件介绍。他于是从互联网上找到了大量的信息来确认事件的真实性——那还是在2003年大防火墙矗立起来之前，像“6月4日”这样的词语后来都被屏蔽。他得出了一个新的结论：“互联网将开启民主之门。”
出于对事情真相的渴求，温在后来十年里把自己转化成一个信息机器，同时从事记者和网络写手的职业。现实生活中，他为政府报纸和电视台采写新闻，完全遵从官方路线制作报道和评论。然而在网络上，他摆出的是一种自由自在、不受约束的姿态。他用笔名创作的一篇著名文章是《醉人呓语》。温很快就全职在网络上工作，为中国互联网公司网易撰写文章，并且兼职成为中国最早的民间记者之一。他的第一篇文章是在手机上完成的，记录了2007年厦门人民通过上街游行成功地阻止了修建化工厂的计划。
监察和管制一直萦绕在他身旁，温的生活就是一场永无止境的捉迷藏游戏。首先，他的一些帖子被删除了，然后他的博客无法登录，后来他在国内的互联网端口也无法使用了，甚至他使用的海外服务器也被大防火墙关闭了。在新的科技大潮驱使下，温开始使用有140个字数限制的推特和在中国迅速发展起来的微博服务。中国的微博是推特的翻版，两年时间已经让它拥有了2亿拥护，每天发布4000万条信息。政府为了加紧监控的脚步，依靠互联网公司来检查自己网站中的内容，这样才可以积累“自律”的积分以换取更新营业执照的资格。温说：“哪里都不安全，但是无论监察怎样严格，讽刺和嘲弄的机会也越来越多。”
不久之前，温甚至敢于把中国最不可撼动的形象毛泽东作为嘲弄的对象。主席已经去世35年了，但他的大幅肖像依然在俯瞰天安门广场，温认为这种现象就表示共和国的创立者依然在发挥“负面的影响力”。即使在今天的中国，嘲弄毛依然是不可想象的。即便如此，在2009年毛逝世纪念日时，温号召他的网络粉丝私下加入“反毛”运动。在中文里，“毛”与“毛发”同意，所以他建议人们把身体某些部位剃毛前和剃毛后的照片发上来——从文字意义上说，这表示人们“去毛”。
温是个大肚汉，留着亚伯拉罕林肯•林肯式的胡须。那一天，网上出现了数百张刮干净下巴和小腿的照片，其中当然也有温的贡献：他圆肚子上的体毛被修剪成推特的标志“t”。温的腹部献礼相当搞笑，表现了一个更加开放的中国，但也是对中国当局非常危险的摊牌。
当皮三还是个小孩子的时候——差不多就是他创造的动画形象哐哐的年纪——他的父母每次抓到他在课本边缘涂鸦，就会用尺子打他的手掌。皮三的家住在山西省山区的一个铜矿城镇里，他说：“我是个中等学生，我的父母认为乱涂乱画会让我注定在矿区生活一辈子。”
惩罚是惩罚，皮三依然坚持绘画，他甚至把自己创作的功夫明星漫画卖给朋友们。大约20年之后，皮三在2005年创办了互象动画公司。“798”是位于北京东北部废弃电子设备的厂区，现在已经变成了聚集着画廊、工作室和咖啡厅的时髦场所，互象的50名年轻设计师就在这里的一层楼中办公。他们大部分都和老板的穿着一样，全身上下一身黑，挤在一排排电脑旁边。敲击键盘的咔嗒声在空旷的厂房里回响。
皮三在北京的工作室里，旁边是泡芙小姐，一个受欢迎的（与政治无关）的动画形象。
我在三月初第一次参观他的四层楼工作室，皮三在企业家和策划者之间的角色转换显得游刃有余，他开玩笑地说自己有人格分裂。几年前，互象曾经为中国中央电视台——政府最主要的宣传工具——制作过一个动画系列片，但是皮对于缺少创作自由度极为沮丧。他说：“CCTV的动画片全是在灌输理念，不是为了娱乐。”现在，他和他的员工们为客户制作互联网动画广告和视频，其中包括摇滚歌星和摩托罗拉、三星等世界500强企业。
4月中旬，我看到皮三和他的团队制作《泡芙小姐》其中一集的过程，这是互象利润最高的一部动画系列剧。动画片的主角是一个颇为下流、对政治毫无兴趣的女人，监察机构只在她肩上的衣带滑落时才注意到泡芙的存在。这部剧是中国类似YouTube的网站优酷第一部委托制作的原创动画作品。两个星期之前，优酷第一个删除了他的反监察讽刺作品“克瓜子”。皮三认为这无所谓，互象的收入主要依靠“泡芙小姐”的成功。他对我说：“在中国要成功，你需要有点人格分裂。有些事情是为了挣钱，有些事情是为了兴趣。”
那天下午皮三很忙，依然没有艾未未的消息，对于自己、妻子和7岁儿子的未来，他的情绪在愤怒、恐惧和顺从之间摇摆不定。他带我离开互象的工作室，来到后面一个堆满纸板的房间，那些都是哐哐动画片中使用的小型背景。皮说：“情绪高涨的时候，我就会来到这里”。他俯身查看一个8英寸高的房间模型，那是《克瓜子》的房间道具。
旁边的一个小学校建筑物曾经出现在皮三2009年第一部哐哐讽刺作品中，这部名为《炸学校》的作品抨击了中国的教育制度。它在中国的年轻人群中产生了轰动效应，出现的第一天就有数百万浏览量。当然，这也激怒了政府官员，他们以“内容不当”为理由对皮三处以罚款。随着越来越多的反叛性哐哐作品出现，几乎每个省份的互联网拥趸都成立了俱乐部，把泡泡头男孩和他的其它动画形象作为崇拜的偶像。
《炸学校》
皮三的作品中，没有任何一部比得上1月底发布的《小兔子乖乖》更具煽动性地直指社会阴暗面。这部4分钟的作品开头是一张中国农历兔年的贺年片，那是一个有关小兔子的睡前故事。但是当哐哐进入梦乡之后，故事变成了一场噩梦。统治阶级老虎（即将过去的农历年）承诺要“构建和谐森林”——直接影射胡锦涛的口头语，兔子们遭受了无尽的痛苦。婴儿饮用污染牛奶死亡；因为房屋被强拆而上街抗议的兔子被老虎的汽车压死；一个肇事逃逸的鲁莽老虎司机吹嘘他有高层官员保护。
这部没有太多掩饰的寓言故事都是基于在互联网上引发民众愤怒的真实事件。然而结尾却是纯粹的幻想：兔子们不愿接受自己的命运，集体反抗，以“南方公园”类型的暴力用他们的牙齿把老虎领主撕成碎片。起义的结尾有一句警告语：“兔子急了还咬人呐！”
《小兔子乖乖》
皮三知道，《小兔子乖乖》或许已经越过了那条线。他于是请人算了一卦——自称“想看看会不会给自己带来麻烦”，之后他决定还是要低调一些。他在半夜里把视频上传到几个小规模的网站上，即使如此，在两个小时的时间里，《小兔子乖乖》有7万浏览量。等到监察机构在两天后开始删除网络上迅速蔓延的视频时，已经有大约300万到400万人看过了。地方媒体没有提及这件事，但外国记者纷纷询问他在视频中试图传达的政治信息。他假装无辜地说：“我就是做了一个童话故事。”
皮三的黑色幽默作品出现的时机，正是在社会媒体的兴风作浪下，突尼斯和埃及推翻独裁者的革命进行得如火如荼的时候。几个星期之后，有传言说如果有人在网络上暗示同样的“茉莉花”也会发生在中国，就会被逮捕。皮三承认：“我有些担心了，那条看不见的线总是在移动着，我们永远不知道自己脚下是否安全。”
大部分中国用户不会去考虑横在“可接受的嘲讽”和“不可容忍的冒犯”之间那条看不见的线。他们或许知道有这样一个限制的存在，但是他们的网络活动——购物、聊天、游戏、社交——在大防火墙下似乎都在正常运作。但是对越来越多的艺术家和活动家来说，这条界限是他们最关注的事情。香港大学中国媒体项目研究员David Bandurski说：“政府最主要的管控手段就是这条模糊的线。谁也不知道它究竟横在哪里，监察的效力就在于不确定性、自我监察以及它制造出来的恐怖气氛。”
去年，当奥斯陆的评委把诺贝尔和平奖授予中国被监禁的作家小波波之后，温在就感觉到了界线的变化。很少有中国人曾经听说过这个淋巴县长背后的人，因为一切全被大防火墙屏蔽了。政府对此的表现相当狂躁，他们在媒体上诽谤刘的罪名，敦促其它国家抵制颁奖仪式，还在网络上屏蔽了一些词语，甚至包括“挪威”和“诺贝尔”。
当“空椅子”这个表现刘缺席诺贝尔颁奖仪式最形象的词语也被屏蔽了之后，温有了一个想法。文字既然不能发布，为什么不用一些空椅子的照片来赞颂刘呢？温在推特和微博上向他的4万多名粉丝号召：“每个人都有一张空椅子，如果我们只是在旁观，那么有一天（空椅子）就会出现在你家人的餐桌旁。”在他的号召下，网络用户上传了数十张看似无害的图片，从梵高作品中的空椅子，到宜家家居的广告图片。监察机构最终领会到这个玩笑的目的，但温已经把微博上的恶作剧在某种程度上转化成人权宣言。
三个月之后，大规模的镇压行动开始了，似乎北京在担心中东和北非的起义运动会导致国内的某些反响。温在香港的时候收到了一封邮件，发件人是中国公安局的警员：“不要回家，你见到老婆和儿子之前就会被逮捕。”他的家现在多了一把空椅子。温决定在香港等待危机平息，那里的法律和与中国其它地方不同。温或许躲过了牢狱之灾，但现在居无定所。
温云超在香港的公寓中。
我在4月份去香港拜访过温，他住在一个临时的公寓中，一排洗过的衬衫挂在窗户旁边。他的晚餐是6片牛肉，到凌晨1点又加上几根烤香肠。有时他会掏出黑莓，一边浏览他的好友名单一边说：“不在了，不在了，不在了……”这些消失的人很可能已经被警方拘留。
温的推特空间中现在挤满了像苍蝇一样嗡嗡叫的五毛党——这是一个绰号，据说这些人每发布一次支持政府的言论会获得人民币5毛钱的报酬。他让我看他收到的铺天盖地的诽谤信息，还有两个五毛党建立的假推特账户，和他自己的一模一样。更让他觉得恐怖的是一个匿名者给他发来的信息，这个人似乎对他了如指掌：他的身份证号码、他的旅行计划，甚至他妻子、10岁儿子和他父母的所有细节。
夜幕刚刚降临的时候，温还在嘲笑政府的恐吓行为：“政府在互联网上投入了太多了资金，彻底关闭互联网不是一个选择，所以他们能做的就是威胁和恫吓。”但是随着夜越来越深，啤酒罐慢慢堆积起来，他袒露了心声：“我很担心即使在香港他们也会逮捕我，我更担心家人。”
第二天，我和温一起到位于香港与中国大陆边界的岭南大学去，他要在那里发布一个有关互联网行动的演讲。火车开出之后，他向我讲述了他在香港窘迫的生活状态。一家本地卫视公司聘请他制作一个节目，准备向中国大陆播出。晚上，温依旧在推特上发挥他惊人的能量，对大防火墙进行嘲弄和讽刺，就像一个小孩向中世纪城堡厚厚的围墙上掷石子。他的妻子和儿子在几个月之后就会来到香港，但是不能回家依然让他感到非常郁闷。他对我说：“有一天，一个朋友管我叫‘盲流’，我真的很生气。这是个糟糕的字眼，我从没想到自己会与这个词发生关系。”
那天晚上在大学里，一张铺着红色天鹅绒的桌子摆在户外一片小空场中。温从别人手中接过一个麦克风，但他似乎并不需要，因为下边只有十来个学生。火车站就在离此几百码的中国边境上，听到飞驰而过的火车声，温把他的视线从黑莓上抬起，望着他可能永远无法跨过的那条界线。
去年6月份的时候，北京笼罩在闷热的浓雾中，皮三开始变得无精打采。艾未未被捕已经两个月了，他的命运和关押地点一点消息也没有。警方还拘捕了皮三的另一位好朋友——摇滚音乐家左小祖咒，因为在一次现场音乐会中，他头上的大屏幕中出现了“释放艾未未”的字样。虽然音乐家在被捕当天就被释放了，但是皮三感到了恐惧。他打消了制作新一部哐哐动画片的念头，第一次开始严肃考虑朋友的建议——离开这个国家。
6月22日传来了一个惊喜的消息：艾在被拘禁81天之后重新回到了家里。这位艺术家破坏分子明显地消瘦了，而且一反常态地沉默。尽管到目前为止还没有被以任何罪名起诉，他依然被软禁“等待进一步调查”逃税问题。两天之后，皮三骑着他的电动自行车来到艾工作室的蓝色大门前——他说“就像一个送货员”。艾像往常一样兴致勃勃地在小房间里走来走去，给皮三讲述他是怎么瘦下来的。两人朋友交谈了几个小时。由于艾依然被软禁，所以他们合作讽刺动画的计划只能推迟。皮三即将告辞的时候，艾给了他一个监禁期间留下的纪念品：几块变质的饼干——他“狱中节食计划”的一部分。
很多艺术家和博客写手都认为艾被释放，仅仅是一个保全面子的手段，让温家宝总理几天后到欧洲的访问不至遭遇尴尬。还有数十位律师和互联网活动家依然在没有正式起诉罪名的情况下被拘禁，政府对其他人的骚扰也没有减轻的迹象。皮三说：“我不能说事情还和以前完全一样，”但是看到艾回家“让我松了一口气”。
7月的时候，我又一次造访皮三。他7岁的儿子剃了夏天的光头，在他父亲的木桌子上玩iPad游戏。皮三穿着短裤和拖鞋，显得轻松又愉快。
皮三的生意顺风顺水。前十集《泡芙小姐》吸引了200万观众，其中一半以上都是18岁到30岁的女性。优酷成功地提高了广告费率，这是互象最大的收入来源。另外几家网站也开始和皮三接触，提出了优厚的条件，希望把他的拥趸拉到自己的网站中来。
皮三在情绪最低落的时候曾经发誓再也不做讽刺作品了，跟监察机构和安全部门打太极拳很伤脑筋，他家人所冒的风险太高了。现在，艾被释放了，他的恐惧也逐渐减退。他试图解释为什么其它艺术家和博客写手要么被监禁，要么被流放，而他得以全身而退：“我觉得政府依然认为我做的东西就是动画片，小孩玩意。”他又说：“动画片是描述我们国家荒谬之处最实际的方法。”尽管如此，皮三兴致勃勃地去拥抱的，是一个错误的概念。
不久之前，皮三再一次回到了他那堆满纸板的小屋里，他说：“我觉得还有几个故事没有讲完。”他已经设计好了几个新的哐哐故事框架。下一个主题是什么呢？皮三闪过一丝微笑：“捉迷藏。”
原文：
Wen Yunchao at his apartment in Hong Kong.
The cellphone vibrated softly, insistently, echoing off the whitewashed walls of the artist’s studio. It was a Sunday morning in early April, and Wang Bo — an Internet animator better known to his legions of online fans by his nickname, Pi San — ignored the call at first. He wanted no intrusions. A compact 40-year-old with short-cropped hair and arched eyebrows that give him a look of permanent bemusement, Pi San is most famous for creating a mischievous cartoon character named Kuang Kuang, but he earns money by making animations for corporations, and he was on a deadline. Pi San had bicycled to his studio in a defunct factory building on the outskirts of Beijing that morning, hoping to finish up some work in peace. But the buzzing of the phone didn’t stop.
The moment Pi San picked up, the caller blurted out the news: State security agents had just detained Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous contemporary artist and a government critic. Pi San spat out a profanity. Over the previous six weeks, hundreds of bloggers — lawyers, activists, journalists — had vanished into police custody in one of the harshest assaults on social activism in decades. Now they had Ai — fat, brilliant, bombastic and internationally renowned. If Ai could be arrested, was any independent thinker in China safe?
Pi San had reason to be scared. He and Ai were friends. A few weeks earlier, over lunch, the two artists talked about collaborating on a satirical Internet animation. Though a bit wary of Ai’s Web activism, Pi San admired his daring solo exhibitions in New York, Berlin and London. The most recent show had consisted of 100 million sunflower seeds made of porcelain, laid out across the floor of the Tate Modern, which visitors were invited to walk upon. Some considered the seeds to be symbols of the downtrodden Chinese people.
Despite his fear, Pi San quickly posted the news about Ai’s detention on Sina Weibo, China’s closely monitored equivalent of Twitter and the fastest-growing Internet platform in the world. An invisible censor deleted the message in seconds. He then tried posting, without comment, a cartoon drawing of Ai, the better to evade China’s word-sensitive filtering software. But the image disappeared, too — a sign that a human being, not computer software, had deleted the drawing. Pi San told his Weibo followers: “Again I was ‘harmonized.’ It’s just a picture!”
Now the creative synapses started firing. “I had to do something to lift the fear,” Pi San told me later. “Others might write or protest; I make animations.” He and a colleague worked feverishly through the night on a 54-second flash animation entitled “Crack Sunflower Seeds.” The animation takes place in Kuang Kuang’s school, where a little girl is speaking over the loudspeakers. “Once upon a time,” she begins, “there was a Chinese man selling sunflower seeds.” Suddenly, a black cartoon hand yanks her off the set. A succession of trembling announcers tries to tell the same story, but the black hand pulls them off too, each time more quickly than the last.
Finally, it is Kuang Kuang’s turn. The boy hems and haws and, giving up, sighs in exasperation: “Ai.” A word bubble appears with the Chinese character for the sigh (哎), virtually the same as Ai’s surname (艾). Kuang Kuang is hauled off, screaming. In the next frame, the black hand sweeps away sunflower seeds arranged in the same “Ai.” Then we hear a grating sound — teeth meeting porcelain — followed by an off-screen scream: “Damn it! Who sold us these fake sunflower seeds?”
Pi San finished the animation before dawn on April 4, less than 24 hours after Ai was detained. “I hesitated for a second before posting it online,” he told me. “But then I thought, If I don’t put it up, that would be like self-castration.” With a few clicks, he sent “Crack Sunflower Seeds” into cyberspace, posting it onto China’s top video Web sites. In just a few hours, a million or more netizens watched the animation online. Then the video began disappearing from Chinese Web sites one by one, just like the announcers in his animation. Pi San lashed out directly at the censors in a Weibo post: “You’re like the eunuch who gets worried before the emperor does!” There was no response. Even in his anger, Pi San was left wondering if the black hand would come for him.
No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China’s, tracking down unwanted content and supposed miscreants among the online population of 500 million with an army of more than 50,000 censors and vast networks of advanced filtering software. Yet despite these restrictions — or precisely because of them — the Internet is flourishing as the wittiest space in China. “Censorship warps us in many ways, but it is also the mother of creativity,” says Hu Yong, an Internet expert and associate professor at Peking University. “It forces people to invent indirect ways to get their meaning across, and humor works as a natural form of encryption.”
To slip past censors, Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge, cloaking their messages in protective layers of irony and satire. This is not a new concept, but it has erupted so powerfully that it now defines the ethos of the Internet in China. Coded language has become part of mainstream culture, with the most contagious memes tapping into widely shared feelings about issues that cannot be openly discussed, from corruption and economic inequality to censorship itself. “Beyond its comic value, this humor shows where netizens are pushing against the boundaries of the state,” says Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose Web site, China Digital Times, maintains an entertaining lexicon of coded Internet terms. “Nothing else gives us a clearer view of the pressure points in Chinese society.”
So pervasive is this irreverent subculture that the Chinese have a name for it: egao, meaning “evil works” or, more roughly, “mischievous mockery.” In its simplest form, egao (pronounced “EUH-gow”) lampoons the powerful without being overtly rebellious. President Hu Jintao’s favorite buzz word, “harmony,” which he deploys constantly when urging social stability, is hijacked to signify censorship itself, as in, “My blog’s been harmonized.” June 4, the censored date of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters, is rendered as May 35 — or “535.” There are also more complex forms of egao, like Hu Ge’s 2010 film spoof, “Animal World,” in which a rare species of Internet users is “saved” from “compulsive thinking disorder,” i.e., the urge to think freely.
Pi San in his studio in Beijing with Ms. Puff, a popular (apolitical) creation.
Satire is sometimes a safety valve that government might grudgingly permit. Better a virtual laugh, after all, than a real protest. But being laughed at, as Orwell found during his stint as a colonial police officer in Burma, can also be a ruler’s greatest fear. And the Chinese government, which last year sentenced a woman to a year of hard labor for a sarcastic three-word tweet, appears to suffer from an acute case of humor deficiency. “Jokes that mock the abuse of power do more than let off steam; they mobilize people’s emotions,” says Wen Yunchao, an outspoken blogger who often mounts sardonic Internet campaigns in defense of free speech. “Every time a joke takes off,” Wen says, “it chips away at the so-called authority of an authoritarian regime.”
Satirical threads sweeping across the Internet can often seem like brush fires whose origins are lost in the conflagration. But behind every outbreak are individuals probing the limits of self-expression, flirting, often perilously, with the blurry line between the permissible and the punishable. Over the past several months I followed two individuals — the animator Pi San and the blogger Wen Yunchao — in an effort to understand the dynamics of “mischievous mockery” and the increasingly serious game of cat-and-mouse taking place along China’s digital front lines.
Pi San and Wen are perfect counterpoints — a northerner and a southerner who approach egao from different angles. One specializes in visual images, the other mainly in words. Pi San shudders at being considered an activist; he sees satire as an artistic way to vent personal frustration. Wen wears the activist label proudly; he views humor as a “weapon of the weak” to mobilize civil society. As the government crackdown intensified, each man was forced to adjust his calculations of danger and opportunity: How far could they go before they crossed the invisible line?
Wen learned the true power of Internet humor not from a joke but from a cry for help from a police interrogation room. Early one morning in July 2009, Wen, who is 39, woke up in his apartment in the southern city of Guangzhou to find a startling message on his Twitter feed: “I have been arrested by Mawei police, SOS.” The jailhouse tweet was from Guo Baofeng, a young friend and fellow blogger, referring to a district in the coastal city Xiamen, some 300 miles away. Minutes later came another tweet from Guo, also in English: “Pls help me, I grasped the phone during police sleep.”
Then there was nothing.
Wen knew how easily people could disappear into the labyrinths of China’s prison system. Guo, who was then a 25-year-old English-language translator, had reposted a video in which the mother of a gang-raped murder victim accused local Xiamen authorities of a cover-up. Now Wen wondered how far the police would go to muzzle the messenger.
The tweets from detention — and the silence that followed — unsettled Wen. But what could he do? Any direct protest would be shut down immediately, even if people could overcome their fear to participate. Then he noticed a phrase that was going viral on the Internet: “Jia Junpeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner!”
The line’s origins were a mystery, but the online masses latched onto it as a joking commentary on their Web-addicted generation — lost in cyberspace, unreachable by the outside world. That very day, millions retweeted the phrase. Wen, though, gave it a new twist. He urged his tens of thousands of microblog followers to send postcards to the Mawei police station and post photos of them online, all with the same words: “Guo Baofeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner!”
Nobody can know if the Internet campaign made a difference. But instead of being lost in the prison system — four other bloggers arrested for reposting the same video were sentenced to one to two years in prison — Guo was released after 16 days. For Wen, the incident crystallized his thinking. “Humor can amplify the power of the social media,” he told me. “If it hits a nerve, like a case of injustice or abuse, it can be contagious. It’s indirect — just a joke, right? — so people lose their fear of getting involved.”
Growing up as the oldest child in a poor family in rural Guangdong Province, Wen wasn’t always keen to get involved himself. When army tanks crushed the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing, Wen, who was then a middle-school student prone to skipping class, applauded the crackdown. “I agreed with the government that it was necessary to prevent chaos,” he recalls. Wen’s most daring act in college — he was assigned to study machine welding at a technical institute in Harbin, a city in China’s icy far north — was to smuggle in Cantonese pornography and pop music to help him endure the long winters.
His Internet “awakening,” as he calls it, came years later, when he toiled at a power station near Guangzhou. One night after clocking out, Wen watched a television special beamed in from nearby Hong Kong that contradicted the official story of the 1989 massacre. Finding a trove of information online to confirm its veracity — this was before the Great Firewall, erected in 2003, blocked such terms as “June 4” — he emerged with a new conviction: “The Internet will open the door of democracy.”
Hungry to learn more, Wen transformed himself over the next decade into an information machine, first as a journalist and then as a blogger. Covering events for state-run newspapers and, later, for government television, he produced reports and commentaries that toed the official line. On the Internet, though, he adopted a more freewheeling persona, writing a popular blog called Ramblings of a Drunkard under a pseudonym. Soon, Wen moved full time online, working for the Chinese Internet company Netease and moonlighting as one of the country’s earliest citizen journalists. His first article, typed into his cellphone, chronicled the 2007 street protests in Xiamen that succeeded in halting construction of a chemical plant.
The censors were never far behind, turning Wen’s life into a perpetual game of hide-and-seek. First a few posts were blocked, then his entire blog, then the Chinese Internet portal he used. An overseas Web server worked until the Great Firewall shut it out too. Riding the next wave of technology, Wen began typing out 140-character blasts on Twitter and China’s fast-growing microblogging sites. Weibo, a Twitter equivalent that barely existed two years ago, now has 200 million users, churning out some 40 million messages a day. The government, hard-pressed to keep up, leans on Web companies to censor their own content in return for “self-discipline” points needed to renew licenses. “No place is safe anymore,” Wen says. “But whenever censorship grows, so do the opportunities for sarcasm and satire.”
Not long ago, Wen even dared to target China’s most unassailable icon: Mao Zedong. The chairman has been dead for 35 years, but his massive portrait still presides over Tiananmen Square. It is just one sign of what Wen calls the “awful influence” wielded by the founder of the People’s Republic. Ridiculing Mao is almost unthinkable in China today. Even so, on the anniversary of Mao’s death in 2009, Wen urged his online followers to join a devious “de-Maoification” campaign. Since “mao” is also the Chinese word for “hair,” he suggested posting before-and-after shots of shaved body parts — people literally “getting rid of mao.”
Wen is a beer-bellied man with a thick Abraham Lincoln-style beard. Among the hundreds of images of shorn beards and hair-free legs that flashed across the Web that day was Wen’s own contribution: a photo of his rotund belly with its hair in a topiary of the “t” of the Twitter logo. Wen’s abdominal salute was funny, but it was also a manifesto for a more open China — and a dangerous move in his showdown with Chinese authorities.
When Pi San was a young boy — around the same age as his impish creation, Kuang Kuang — his parents used to smack his hand with a ruler every time they caught him drawing cartoons in the margins of his school books. “I was a mediocre student,” says Pi San, whose family lived in a bleak copper-mining town in the hills of Shanxi Province. “My parents thought my doodling doomed me to a life in the mine.”
Despite the punishment, Pi San kept drawing, even selling caricatures of Kung Fu heroes to his friends. Nearly two decades later, Pi San runs Hutoon, the animation company he founded in 2005. Hutoon’s staff of 50 young designers fills most of a floor in “798,” a trendy district of art galleries, studios and cafes built on the remnants of a military electronics factory in northeastern Beijing. The young men and women — most dressed in black, like their boss — huddle over banks of computers, the clicketyclack of keyboards resounding in the high-ceilinged industrial space.
Blow Up the School
This mordant swipe at the educational system is one of Pi San’s first animations to feature his bubble-headed character, Kuang Kuang. On its first day on the Internet, in 2009, “Blow Up the School” was viewed three million times. Government officials were not amused; they slapped Pi with a fine for “inappropriate content.”
Good Teacher
Like many in Pi San’s Kuang Kuang series, this animation appeals to his generation’s nostalgia for childhood and its veiled frustration with a rigid system. Pi, whose company, Hutoon, produces more refined animations for corporate clients, says he returns to Kuang Kuang when “my emotions are running high.”
Little Rabbit, Be Good
Pi San’s darkest satire, this 2011 animation begins as a soothing “greeting card” for the Chinese Year of the Rabbit and morphs into a nightmare of social injustices. Each of the indignities suffered by the rabbits reflects actual abuses of power that have sparked outrage on the Internet. Only the ending is sheer fantasy: a violent uprising against the ruling tigers. By chance, the animation came out in late January, just as popular revolutions were sweeping across North Africa.
Crack Sunflower Seeds
Spurred by the detention of the artist and government critic Ai Weiwei in April, Pi San created this satirical animation as a tribute to Ai — and, more broadly, as an indictment of the corrosive effects of censorship on society, on language itself. A masterpiece of comic subterfuge, the animation refers to Ai not by name but mainly through the subject of one of his most famous solo exhibitions: the 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds he laid out across the floor of the Tate Modern in 2010.
When I first visited his fourth-floor studio in early March, Pi San seemed to move easily between his roles as entrepreneur and provocateur, a reflection of what he jokingly calls his multiple-personality disorder. A few years ago, Hutoon produced an animated series for China Central Television — the government’s main propaganda arm — but Pi San chafed at the lack of creative freedom. “Even CCTV’s cartoons are all about indoctrination, not entertainment,” he said. Now he and his staff crank out animated Internet ads and videos for clients including rock stars and Fortune 500 firms like Motorola and Samsung.
In mid-April, I watched Pi San and his crew work on an episode of “Ms. Puff,” Hutoon’s most lucrative animation series. Centered on a risqué but apolitical female character — censors notice Puff only when the strap on her camisole slips — the series is the first original animated content commissioned by Youku, the Chinese equivalent of YouTube. Two weeks earlier, Youku had been one of the first Web sites to delete his anti-censorship satire, “Crack Sunflower Seeds.” This didn’t matter to Pi San. Hutoon’s financial future depended on the success of “Ms. Puff.” “You have to have a split personality to succeed in China,” he told me. “With some animations, I make money. With others, I just make fun.”
That afternoon, though, the boss was preoccupied. There was no news of Ai Weiwei, and Pi San’s thoughts about the future — that of his wife and their 7-year-old son — cycled between anger, fear and resignation. Leaving Hutoon’s main studio, he led me to a back room filled with heaps of corrugated cardboard, which were the miniature sets used in the Kuang Kuang animations. “This is where I come when my emotions are running high,” Pi San said, bending down to examine the eight-inch-tall room that loomed large in “Crack Sunflower Seeds.”
Nearby was a tiny school building featured in Pi San’s first Kuang Kuang satire in 2009, a mordant swipe at the education system called “Blow Up the School.” An instant Internet sensation among Chinese youth, the animation generated a few million hits on its first day and so angered officials that they slapped him with a fine for “inappropriate content.” As more irreverent Kuang Kuang videos appeared, Internet fan clubs formed in nearly every Chinese province, turning the bubbleheaded boy and his creator into minor cult figures.
None of Pi San’s work has evoked China’s social ills more provocatively than “Little Rabbit, Be Good,” made last January. The four-minute “greeting card” to mark the Chinese Year of the Rabbit begins as a soothing bedtime story about bunny rabbits. But as Kuang Kuang drifts off to sleep, the story morphs into a nightmare. Ruled by tigers (the outgoing zodiac sign) who promise to “build a harmonious forest” — a pointed jab at Hu Jintao’s catchphrase — the rabbits suffer an endless series of abuses. Babies die from drinking poisoned milk. A protester fighting forced eviction gets crushed under a tiger’s car. A reckless driver kills a rabbit in a hit-and-run and boasts about his high-level police protection.
The thinly disguised allegory is based on real-life events that sparked outrage on the Internet. The ending, however, is sheer fantasy. Instead of accepting their fate, the rabbits rise up in revolt, ripping their tiger overlords apart with their bare teeth in a catharsis of “South Park”-style violence. The uprising ends with a warning: “Even rabbits bite when they are pushed.”
Pi San knew “Little Rabbit” might have crossed the line. After consulting a fortuneteller — “I wanted to know if this would cause me trouble,” he said — he hedged his bets, uploading the video to a few small fan Web sites in the middle of the night. “Little Rabbit” still received more than 70,000 hits within two hours, he says. By the time censors deleted the versions proliferating across the Internet two days later, an estimated three to four million people had seen it. Local media didn’t touch the story, but foreign journalists pressed him on the video’s political message. His coy response: “I only made a fairy tale.”
Pi San’s dark satire landed just as popular revolutions fueled by social media in Tunisia and Egypt were beginning to topple dictators. A few weeks later, Chinese bloggers who alluded online to the possibilities of a similar “jasmine” revolution in China would be detained. “I was worried,” Pi San admitted. “The line moves all the time, so we never know where we stand.”
Most Chinese Internet users don’t give the invisible line between acceptable satire and detainable offense a second thought. They may know it exists, but their online activities — shopping, blogging, gaming, networking — remain safely within the confines of the Great Firewall. But the boundary is of the utmost concern for a growing number of artists and activists. “The government’s primary means of control is the fuzzy line,” says David Bandurski, a researcher at the China Media Project at Hong Kong University. “No one ever knows exactly where the line is. The control apparatus is built on uncertainty and self-censorship, on creating this atmosphere of fear.”
Wen felt the line shift a year ago, after judges in Oslo awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the jailed Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo. Few Chinese had ever heard of the man behind Charter 08, the human-rights declaration that, like Liu’s name, was banned inside the Great Firewall. But the government was apoplectic. Chinese officials smeared the “criminal” Liu in the press, pressured foreign countries to boycott the ceremony and blocked a raft of new words on the Internet, even “Norway” and “Nobel.”
When the banned words extended to the phrase “empty chair” — the most conspicuous sign of Liu’s absence at the Nobel ceremony — Wen hit on an idea. If the words were not allowed, why not post photos of empty chairs as a tribute to Liu? “Everyone has an empty chair,” Wen pleaded with his 40,000-plus followers on Twitter and Weibo. “If we only watch, then one day [the empty chair] might appear by your family’s dining table as well.” At his urging, bloggers posted dozens of seemingly innocuous pictures online, from an empty chair in a Van Gogh painting to a magazine ad for an Ikea lounger. The censors eventually caught on to the joke, but not before Wen had turned a bit of microblog mischief into a human rights statement.
Three months later came the broad crackdown seeming to stem from Beijing’s paranoia about the possible domestic repercussions from the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. Wen was visiting Hong Kong when he received an e-mail warning from Chinese public-security agents: “Don’t come home. You’ll be arrested before you even see your wife and son.” His was now the empty chair. Wen decided to wait out the threats in Hong Kong, which is governed by different laws than the rest of China. Wen’s absence may have spared him detention or prison, but now he was in limbo.
When I visited Wen in Hong Kong in April, he was living in a temporary apartment with a row of shirts drip-drying in the window. Dinner consisted of a six-pack of beer followed by sausages fried up at 1 a.m. At one point, he pulled out his BlackBerry. “Gone, gone, gone,” Wen said, as he scrolled down a list of friends who had vanished, most likely into police custody.
Wen’s Twitter account was now swarming with the gadflies of the 50-Cent Party, which is the nickname for commentators who reportedly get paid 50 Chinese cents for every pro-government post. He showed me the barrage of disparaging tweets he had received, along with two fake Twitter accounts the 50-Centers had set up to look like his. More menacing were the text warnings from anonymous senders who seemed to know everything about him: his identification number, his travel itineraries, even details about his wife, his 10-year-old son and his parents.
Early in the evening, Wen scoffed at the intimidation attempts. “The government has too much invested in the Internet financially to shut it down, so all it can do is resort to scare tactics,” he said. But as the night wore on and the beer cans piled up, he confided: “I’m worried they might pick me up even here in Hong Kong. I’m even more frightened for my family.”
The following day, I joined Wen on an excursion to Lingnan University, along Hong Kong’s border with mainland China, where he was to give a talk about Internet activism. On the train ride out, he spoke about his tenuous life in Hong Kong. A local satellite television company had hired him to develop a show that would beam propaganda-free reports into China. At night, Wen still tweeted prodigiously, launching jokes and spoofs over the Great Firewall, like a medieval catapulter outside the castle ramparts. His wife and son would join him in Hong Kong months later, but Wen’s inability to return freely to his homeland left him depressed. “I got angry the other day when a friend called me a liuwang, an exile,” he told me. “It’s such a sad word. I never thought it would apply to me.”
At the university that evening, a table covered in red velvet had been set up on a small outdoor stage. Wen was handed a microphone, but it proved unnecessary. Fewer than a dozen students stopped to listen. The train home skirted within a few hundred yards of the mainland Chinese border. Hurtling through the darkness, Wen looked up from his BlackBerry and gazed out toward the border, the one line he may never cross again.
As a cocoon of heat and smog enveloped Beijing last June, Pi San began to wilt. Two months had passed since Ai Weiwei was detained, and the artist’s fate and whereabouts were still unknown. The police had also detained another close friend of Pi San’s, the rock musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou, just days after a live performance in which the words “Free Ai Weiwei!” appeared on a giant screen above him. The musician was released within a day, but Pi San was spooked. He shelved an idea for another Kuang Kuang satire and began, for the first time, to consider seriously his friends’ advice to leave the country.
Then, on June 22, came a surprise: Ai reappeared at his home after 81 days in detention. The artist provocateur, much thinner now, was uncharacteristically silent. Though not formally charged with a crime, he was still under a form of house arrest “pending further investigation” into tax fraud. Two days later, Pi San rode his electric bicycle to the blue door of Ai’s studio — “like a delivery boy,” he said. High-spirited as ever, Ai marched back and forth across the small room, showing Pi San how he had lost so much weight. The two friends talked for hours. Given Ai’s house arrest, their plan to collaborate on a satirical animation would have to wait. When Pi San was about to leave, Ai gave him a memento from his days in custody: a couple of stale biscuits, part of his “detention diet.”
Many artists and bloggers interpreted Ai’s release as merely a face-saving measure to help Premier Wen Jiabao avoid embarrassment when he traveled to Europe a few days later. Dozens of other lawyers and Internet activists were still held in detention without formal charges, while the harassment of others continued unabated. “I can’t say if anything has changed,” Pi San said, “but it was a big relief” to see Ai back in his home.
I dropped by Pi San’s studio again in July. This time, I found his 7-year-old son, his head shaved for summer, sitting at his father’s wooden desk and playing a game on an iPad. Pi San shuffled around in shorts and sandals, relaxed and happy. His wife, a fellow painter whom he met at college, worked on accounting ledgers at a table nearby.
Business had never been better. The first 10 episodes of “Ms. Puff” had pulled in an average of two million viewers, more than half of them women between 18 and 30. The Youku series’s success raised ad rates, Hutoon’s largest source of revenue, and several other Web portals had approached Pi San with offers, eager to entice his young viewers to their sites too.
In his darkest moments, Pi San vowed never to make another satire again. Shadowboxing with censors and security agents was too nerve-racking, and the risks to his family were too high. Now, in the wake of Ai’s release, his fear was subsiding. “I think the government still looks at what I do as just cartoons, child’s play,” he said, struggling to explain why other artists and bloggers were detained or forced into exile while he escaped unscathed. It is a misconception Pi San is happy to embrace, even if, as he put it, “animated cartoons may be the most realistic way to capture the absurdity of our country.”
Not long ago, Pi San started gravitating, once again, to the back room filled with miniature cardboard sets. “I think I have a few moves left,” he said. He has already mapped out three new Kuang Kuang episodes. The theme of the next one? Pi San flashed a little grin. “It’s a game of hide-and-seek.”
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狗仔卡
发表于 2011-11-3 13:08
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发表于 2011-11-3 14:18
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