Joyce Yu-Jean Lee

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Joyce Yu-Jean Lee (b. 1979) is a visual artist working with video, photography, interactive installation and performance that combine social practice, institutional critique and activism together in an interdisciplinary practice. She is the founder of FIREWALL Internet Cafe [1] social software consisting of a Google and Baidu dual-search engine that garnered backlash from Chinese state authorities in 2016. [2]

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Background

Lee was born in Richardson, Texas to Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants, James C. and Patty Lee. Her siblings are architect, Juliet Lee and Joshua Lee. Her cousin is jazz pianist, Helen Sung. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the College of Arts & Sciences, University of Pennsylvania in 2002 with a major in Communication and double minors in Psychology and Fine Art.

In 2010, Lee earned her Masters of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art from the Mount Royal School of Art (interdisciplinary graduate program).

Career

Lee was awarded a Vermont Studio Center fellowship supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, as well as a Henry Walters Traveling Scholarship to the Netherlands and Germany by the Walters Museum in Baltimore, MD upon graduating with her MFA in 2010. In 2012, Lee held Passages, a solo exhibition at Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington D.C. [3] In 2013, Lee was awarded the Maryland State Arts Council 2013 Individual Artist Award [4] as well as the Franklin Furnace Fund Grant. [5] The latter was instrumental in her creation of the social project FIREWALL. Lee was awarded the Asian Women Giving Circle grant in 2015 [6] and in 2016, Lee launched the first popup exhibition of FIREWALL at Chinatown Soup in Chinatown, Manhattan. [7] Lee completed her first permanent digital installation, Aqua Lumen, in Alexandria, VA. Aqua Lumen was commissioned by Gables Old Town North in 2019.

Lee is currently Assistant Professor of Art & Digital Media at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

FIREWALL Internet Cafe

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee founded FIREWALL in 2016 as a not-for-profit socially engaged research and interactive art project about Internet censorship. The goal of FIREWALL is to investigate online censorship and foster public dialogue about Internet freedom. FIREWALL consists of a computer station with a dual-search engine that simultaneously shows image results of any queried term in both Google and Baidu, the primary search engine in China. The project website Firewallcafe.com contains an archive of search terms that participants have queried, image results of these searches, and user interaction to vote on whether these results are affected by censorship. FIREWALL has been exhibited at the following locations: Center for Community Cultural Development in Hong Kong (2019), [8] University of Michigan Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design (2019), Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City (2017), The Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway (2016 - 2017).

Related Research Articles

China censors both the publishing and viewing of online material. Many controversial events are censored from news coverage, preventing many Chinese citizens from knowing about the actions of their government, and severely restricting freedom of the press. China's censorship includes the complete blockage of various websites, apps, and video games, inspiring the policy's nickname, the Great Firewall of China, which blocks websites. Methods used to block websites and pages include DNS spoofing, blocking access to IP addresses, analyzing and filtering URLs, packet inspection, and resetting connections.

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The Great Firewall is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic. The Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words. If the keywords or sensitive words appear in the TCP packets, access will be closed. If one link is closed, more links from the same machine will be blocked by the Great Firewall. The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations.

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FIREWALL Internet Café is an art project founded in 2016 by visual artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee as a socially engaged research and interactive art project about Internet censorship. The not-for-profit goal of FIREWALL is to investigate online censorship and foster public dialogue about Internet freedom.

References

  1. ↑ "About – FIREWALL - Internet Cafe" . Retrieved 2019-11-27.
  2. ↑ Denyer, Simon. "How a New York art show about Chinese online censorship found itself censored". Washington Post. Retrieved 2019-11-27.
  3. ↑ Jenkins, Mark (2012-12-07). "Washington's best art gallery exhibitions of 2012". Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2019-11-27.
  4. ↑ "MARYLAND STATE ARTS COUNCIL FY 2013 INDIVIDUAL ARTIST AWARD RECIPIENTS" (PDF).
  5. ↑ "FF Fund". franklinfurnace.org. Archived from the original on 2018-12-29. Retrieved 2019-11-27.
  6. ↑ "2015". Asian Women Giving Circle. 2017-02-05. Retrieved 2019-11-27.
  7. ↑ "Surf China's Censored Web at an Internet Cafe in New York". Hyperallergic. 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2019-11-27.
  8. ↑ Chan, Holmes (2019-01-20). "Two artists ask: what does it mean to live under the shadow of the Great Firewall?". Hong Kong Free Press HKFP. Retrieved 2019-11-27.
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