Joyce Yu-Jean Lee

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: So my name is Joyce Yu-Jean Lee and I'm a visual artist, but my work is primarily using digital media as a means to bring attention to mass media and the way it influences us. Specifically how it shapes our perceptions of the other...

Jacob: So what do you think about your art in terms of how it connects to activism, I know that your art may not always be geared towards activism, there are a lot of transformative pieces, so how do you feel like your relationship between your art and activism is...

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: Well, I think my art practice has two parts, so I have my traditional or more traditional studio practice where I'm working with video installation and projection, so that's -- videos are projected onto objects or different kinds of screens, like a cylindrical screen that you can stand inside of or around or a big piece of glass that's on the wall, 8 feet wide in diameter, that is more like a sculptural and installation-based practice for video. Recently I've actually been making some objects too, so then revisiting photography in a new way, so I've been creating photo collages that are three-dimensional and are relief-based so they come out of the wall. And that, I would say is all part of my traditional studio practice, so work that I show in galleries and non-profit spaces, but I would say that the second part of my practice is the part of my practice that's more concerned with activism, so I think that's why you're interviewing me. And honestly, that part of my practice was not something I had planned for or gone to school for, it just stemmed from a question that I wanted answered, and the only way I knew how to answer it was to create an interactive digital piece where I could solicit participation from the public, and then look at the results that we were able to collect. That part of my practice has grown a lot larger than I thought it would, and I would say now it's about 50% of what I spend my time on. So it was not planned for, it just kind of happened. And I think this part of my practice, I connected with people with the audience and with the press, and as a result, it's kind of taken on a momentum that I didn't expect.

Jacob: One of the big topics in my class that we talked about was how art can unintentionally become activism... The way people perceive art is different, there's so many different perspectives, so sometimes you may unintentionally make something that they speak on... An important topic that needs to be addressed. So how do you think your art shapes the thoughts of those people who see it?

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: I hope that it gets people to slow down a little bit and to pay attention to things that they would otherwise miss in their day-to-day. I also hope that people who see my work understand art in a new light because I try to really use the medium of video and light in a challenging way, and also in regards to my activist practice, use the internet as a medium. And so sometimes I get questions like, "How is this art?" And I think those are good questions because I am trying to challenge the definitions of how people define art with a capital A. I've also had people respond after seeing some of my more studio-based work, my light, and video installations. I've had one response, which I think is my favorite response ever, he said, "Wow, Joyce, after looking at this piece, I feel like I've just gone to church," and I said, "Great because I'm trying to get people to slow down to become introspective, to reflect on themselves and their place in this world, kind of the environment that is our world.” So that's probably the best response I've gotten.

Jacob: Yeah, I feel video installations are a relatively new art medium that I'm seeing more and more every day. They have a lot of places now that even have it interactive... if you've heard of ARTECHOUSE, I feel like the spaces that you create from looking at your website, that they are meditative spaces, places for people to look at and reflect on, and I think you get those messages across very well, so I think a video installation is definitely such a great medium 'cause it just puts people into a different space, a different mindset. So FIREWALL is a piece of Internet censorship, so how do you believe media is being manipulated because, in one of your interviews, you did say that you wanted to change the way, or like you said, Slow down and watch how they take in media. This idea has been really big so far because of the Google CEO being interviewed by Congress, and Facebook marketer being interviewed by Congress on bias and data collection.

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: Yeah, so FIREWALL is a project that I came up with the idea for after I spent some time in China, actually during an artist residency in China, and we had a group of about maybe 12 artists with us that first year, and I was a residency coordinator, so I had to get everybody set up and trying to help them get online, and in order to access things like Gmail and Facebook that Americans are used to and can take for granted to be able to use all the time. I had to give each individual artists a VPN in order to get into these sites because these sites are blocked by the Chinese government, and so after spending a summer there, I had a lot of questions about how censorship worked, it was very common to spend time online in China, and after searching for particular terms that might be sensitive or blocked on the internet, then you see patterns of Wi-Fi becoming unstable or getting cut off, and it leaves me as the user wondering, is there a correlation between this... Is this an act of censorship or is this just bad WiFi... It's hard to tell.

And then when I got back home to the US, actually, our program assistant in China, who's a young gay artist, committed suicide, and so that sequence of events made me really reflect on, What are the life circumstances and some of the negative factors that could have impacted his young artist, and what are the pressures he felt... How did censorship affect his life? Did he feel like he had freedom to be truly who he wanted to be? And unfortunately, I think some of the signs and evidence from his particular situation point to no, so I was curious to be able to capture some of those questions in our project, and I just had this hair brain idea, What if somebody could come into my show and surf the Internet in China and the US at the same time. And so that's how FIREWALL was born.

In terms of your question, you asked a question about the CEO of Google in terms of... Can you just rephrase that again? Was at bias in the media that you were asking about or...

Jacob: Yeah. Bias in data collection. So I was asking how do you believe it is being manipulated because the Google CEO has been interviewed on bias and data collection

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: Yeah, so I think in terms of that, I have a background as a media strategist, actually working on Madison Avenue in the advertising industry in New York City, and so working behind the scenes with all these different media channels gave me an understanding of how these businesses are set up, and what type of research is being done on users. So my entire job as a media strategist before I became an artist was to do research on how people consume media. So I worked on, say, Doritos as a brand, and I was in charge of researching what men, 18 to 34 years of all years of age who are the primary consumers of Doritos, what TV show they watch... When do they watch them? What magazines do they read? What is the most popular time when these consumers are online, what sites today serve, where do they travel, what billboards do they see... All these kinds of questions. And so even before the web became our primary way of communicating with one another and receiving news and programming, big brands and corporations were already tracking how people were consuming media, and this type of monitoring is not new, it was just done in different ways when television...When broadcast television was the primary medium for American households. There's a company called Nielsen, and all they do is research how people watch TV, and people would volunteer to have these meters on the top of their television stations that would record when people watch TV and what they were watching it. So this type of data collection, as you call it, was already existing...

The thing with the internet is it really revolutionized the way we handle information and the way we transfer that from one person to the other, when somebody surfs a website, the website is designed to be able to capture that data. And so I think it's easy to point a finger at corporations like Google that collect more data than their users are even aware of, but really that could be set for all of the advertising industry and efforts by corporations to be able to sell the products. They have to understand their consumer, and so I think the issue of the Internet and data collection and privacy, all these kind of complex issues is a result of technology evolving quicker than corporations and individuals even know what to do with the technology. So in many cases, the technology has already been developed, people don't really know how to use it, and it takes a while for people to catch up before they really know how to utilize the data that they've collected on people. I think this is gonna be a huge problem that we're gonna really have to deal with, and certain things like problems with recent elections, of upcoming elections, have brought this type of awareness in the public mindset into the forefront, and also things like COVID, and things like contract tracing have become a reality in a way that most people probably aren't ready for.

But it's true that technology has always been already been there like our cell phones have GPS that constantly know where we are, whether we've turned that information on to be sent to companies were there. And so I think it's a really complex issue that has evolved out of the way technology has grown and developed...

Jacob: I definitely agree, because everyone is just screaming, it's definitely become very heightened because everyone is saying, "Oh! fake news, fake news!" so you can definitely see how mass media has definitely been biased in some ways and giving out the news.

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: And I think fake news actually is kind of a by-product off of... By-products from the way that media has become so prolific. So if you think about the 50s and 60s, there was only a handful of TV channels that people could watch, and then there was newspapers, magazines, and books. As we think about how that has changed over the time. When I started working in advertising, cable television was the new emerging media that everybody was super doubtful, nobody thought cable television would outgrow broadcast television, but it certainly has, and now we have a whole industry of content providers that are just online, Netflix, Hulu, all these companies and television and cable companies have had to adapt to that, so now their primary content is also being offered online. And so if you think about that and how many outlets there are and ways to consume television to consume media to read about the news, then you can see that media saturation as a real problem, and so fake news, I think, is just a by-product of that, so when there's too much information readily available, how does the consumer know how to discern what is true or not. And I think a lot of people give the benefit the doubt to these companies that they wouldn't want to leave their viewers astray, but I think that's something that each individual really has to take seriously and own that question for themselves because, in the end, we're the ones who are choosing what we watch... And how we watch it. And I think it's really a disservice when individuals automatically rely on these companies to be conveying the truth. So fake news, especially if we think about some of the political forces that are at play, they can result in a lot of corruption and things that are fake misinformation, that word didn't even exist a couple of years ago.

Jacob: I think the great thing about the internet is that we have access to so many resources now compared to in the past, like you said, when we only had cable until just the television to rely on because to get on TV, it costs a lot of money, but to get on to the internet, you can see anybody's perspective. So if people aren't researching that, it's definitely a big problem. For FIREWALL, did you make any prior preparations for backlash or expected any backlash on... With the Chinese government or anything like that?

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: I got my first funding for FIREWALL in 2013, and it wasn't until then that I developed a project, and so the first funders was the Franklin Furnace Fund, which is a foundation that supports performance art and vulnerable media, vulnerable and ephemeral media. And at that point, I thought, Oh okay, so somebody is actually willing to fund this hair-brained idea, now I have to actually build this thing, and it requires... I don't do computer coding myself personally, so it required a lot of collaboration. And once I started working on it, I think a lot of people asked me about what happens if the Chinese government finds out about your project. And I think I was just very naive. I didn't take that concern very seriously, and then I thought, well, it's not like I'm some world-famous artist, why would the Chinese government care?

Unfortunately, I was very wrong. And the Chinese government did care, and so we built up the project over those three years after we got funding and got additional grants from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and also from the Asian Giving Circle. So by the time we debuted our project in 2016, we had a lot of partners and collaborators, including a team of programmers from Google. Google heard about the project and they wanted to be a part of it, and so after we launched the exhibition in 2016 in China Town on the lower east side of Manhattan, we got in trouble. And I didn't get directly in trouble for the Chinese government because I'm an American, I'm Chinese American, but I had involved in many Chinese nationals in my project, and they were targeted and targeted in a very, very serious way. So we had a lawyer who was doing a fellowship at Yale at their Center for Chinese law, and she is a partner of a law firm in the southern provinces of China, and very successful at what she does, but she does a lot of pro bono human rights work legally, and when the government found out she was partnering with a New York artist that was focusing on censorship, she got targeted and she got asked to go back to China to not be able to finish her fellowship and was never allowed to speak in public ever again about her work. So this is a pretty serious reprimand and I never thought that my work would have influence to reach overseas, much less affect another person's life, and so we had to cut off communication immediately.

I have never worked with a Chinese national since then on this project, and they were able to seek safety and asylum through some human rights protection networks, and they're safe but in the US, and never able to return to China again for fear of arrest, and they also had to move their family. So I have suffered repercussions for my activist work and...I think it just comes with the territory. The thing that I learned from that was that authorities and people in positions of power are very afraid of having that power challenged, and one of the things that... One of the things that art does, especially that has an activist kind of intention, is to question and challenge that power, and so even though I'm one person, one artist, and the Chinese government is a huge structure, an organization, there is a sense of threat, and so there are consequences to the people who speak out to that. And so I've learned a lesson that I need to approach this project with a lot of caution, with people who are knowledgeable about how the Chinese government works. I also am very clear that my project is not exclusively critical to the Chinese government, its looking at media as a whole and how the internet is intrinsically biased, the content is intrinsically biased by the structure or the organization or company that creates it, and that police it, and so in countries like China, we have state surveillance and censorship, but in countries like America, we have corporate surveillance and censorship.

Jacob: Yes, it just shows how powerful art can be because most people, they don't think too much about art, but these performances so many artists who have criticized the Chinese government or unintentionally or intentionally have all suffered like Ai Wei Wei (for example). He's been arrested and it just shows how powerful this medium can be.

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: It was actually very interesting. When we were in China for the residency in 2011, actually, our studios were directly across the street from Ai Wei Wei's studios, but the interesting thing is, this is in Caochangdi, which is a small Artist Village in the outer rings of Beijing, and Ai Wei Wei actually designed that Artist Village. So all of the architecture, the way the streets are designed is his design, and he had a big studio compound there, and I think it was also maybe he also had a home there... He has a couple of homes, but we were using studios by these American architects who often work with James Turrell, and they have kind of like a school in a studio set up across the street because they're all architects. Ai Wei Wei was under house arrest after he got arrested, so normally we would have met him, we were able to meet several of his studio foremen and assistants, one of which had been arrested as well, but then was let go, that they would come to our art events and to our parties and we got to hear a little bit about what that house arrest was like. So every day when you go in and out of studios, there's a white van police, it's an unmarked white police van and parked outside of their compound, that registers every single person who goes in and out of their studio and... They're being watched constantly. We saw at all 'cause we were across the street. So yeah, Ai Wei Wei is the best-known artist to Westerners for standing up to the Chinese government, but actually, in China, he's not necessarily that well known, and there are a bunch of other artists that we had the privilege of meeting who have also done performance-based work that have been targeted by the government.

Jacob: So going back to one of the points you made, you talked about the roots and how there was a gay young artist who committed suicide because of the censorship, one of the things in the interview that I noted was the key term happiness, how it's different in the Google search and the Baidu search where happiness in China is having a family, being married, heterosexual marriage, and then having your kids... I think that's also a very important idea, because if this is what you're surrounded by, then that's what you believe must be happiness too, so I'm sure he must have felt a lot of pressure... Not only because he was an artist but because he was gay in China, that must have been a big thing. So I think doing work on censorship is so important because it really affects the way we see the world around us. Do you think after doing FIREWALL, do you have any new perspectives or from other people who have gone through FIREWALL and looked at it? And after receiving their feedback, have you seen a new perspectives or new ideas with others about your work?

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: I think FIREWALL has taught me that art does have power. So I try to steward that responsibly and ethically, and to think that as artists, we have the potential to leave a legacy behind. So what kind of legacy do I want to leave? In terms of FIREWALL, specifically, we've gotten a lot of feedback on how people would like to be able to experience the project. Right now, we do pop-ups, site-specific pop-ups around the world, and people can come to our internet cafe and conduct searches. All of our searches are archived in our search library on our website, FIREWALLcafe.com, and viewers can go on to the website and look through what other people have served and filter the search results by keyword by country, by whether or not they think the term is censored. But we found that really people wanted to be able to see this project and experience it without the ability to access a pop-up. So what we've built into the archive is, even though you may not be able to come to one of our pop-ups in person and conduct searches, you can still interact with the data, and so you can look through the searches and vote on whether you think the results are effected by censorship, and we're continuing to evolve and try to expand the capability of people to be able to participate without attending a pop-up in person. So right now we're developing some new features that will enable machine searching, so basically artificial intelligence, and we're trying to get some script written so that searches can be conducted automatically based on words that people enter through a back-end database or through words that are scraped off the internet based on recent news, things like that, and we're hoping to grow our search archive exponentially, and that this archive can somehow be used as a tool for education about internet culture, misinformation and censorship. This is kind of a big idea, so it's really, really complex to develop something like this, and we've worked with a series of developers across the West Coast and also in New York. So we're hoping that this is possible, fingers crossed.

And I think that FIREWALL has also given me a larger outlook towards how my artwork can be situated in culture, so not just as a visual culture and aesthetic experience, but also an educational one, that it is possible to inform people of subjects. And using, especially if artists can be very innovative with the way they use media, and I don't mean just digital media, but any kind of media, so that's like a bigger concern that I always come to with my new projects now.

Jacob: And sorry, I'm still thinking about on... This is such a big issue now. In the past, I didn't think about it too much, or the internet searches or whatever, but thinking about reflecting on it over these years, it's been so much more important to me to make sure I do all the research I can and not be taking it from one thing, because there's just so many perspectives...

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: Yeah...And actually one of the things I do as a teacher, when I have freshmen who are just starting off in digital media, as I have them read this very old article that was published in the Atlantic a couple of years ago, I think it came out in maybe 2009, it's called "Is Google Making us Stupid?" And the article basically talks about technology and the way we use technology actually rewires the neurology of our brain. We've seen this in mankind through the technology and the advent of many new tools like the typewriter, clock, all of these things re-oriented humans and the way their work gave them a different relationship with time, for example, with the clock, and with the typewriter and the printing press gave us a totally different relationship with text, and Google is a tool that has really given us a different relationship with information and accessibility of information.

I used to have to go to a library and go to a card catalog and find information in books. Now, most of my students don't even know what a card catalog or the Dewey Decimal System is. And misinformation is a concern, so how are people today thinking about research differently, the article talks about the way people try to research and learn is like a jet ski going across the surface of water, it's very, very fast, it can connect broad areas together, disparate sources of information together very quickly. But it's very surface level. It doesn't go super, super deep. And I think that's related to the way we browse on the internet, this is a very fast, superficial type of searching, and once we find our answers, we tend to stop, there's not the same driving inquiry that we would have if we had to read an entire book to get the information we're looking for, and so that's something that I really stress with my students is they need to be aware of their relationship with technology and how it actually changes them, how it changes their ability to be able to take in and process information because if we're not aware of that, we're also not able to counter the negative effects of technology. One of the most obvious being excessive screen time for young people, short their attention span, it makes them unable to concentrate for long periods of time, which is problematic, and so... This is a little bit beyond my art, although I do try to get people to slow down knowing that technology works this way, but I think it's a larger concern of what is one's creative relationship and one's relationship with technology as it relates to how we think and process, our world, and its environments.

Jacob: I know your artwork is more about spreading awareness about how they consume it, but do you think there's ever going to be a solution about media bias or a data collection?

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: I don't know if there's ever gonna be one solution per se because there are many people out there who don't really care if the information they're consuming is being manipulated. That's not something that they will lose sleep over. So I don't think there's going to be one solution. As companies like Google, for example, or Facebook, become more transparent with the way they're collecting and using our data, then people automatically start to become more aware of the larger system and the larger way things are working, and so hopefully that is enough motivation for people to care and to think about how they want to intersect with technology. Unfortunately, I think it's really up to the person on the receiving end to make that decision for themselves, so in that sense, I don't think there's one overarching solution, for example... Doctors and the national health system can continue to tell us that smoking is bad for us, and most people know now that smoking is bad for us, but there's still people who smoke and so they're making that decision for themselves... What do they want to do with that knowledge? And I think media consumption is the same...

Jacob: You make a great point. People know it's bad, but they still do it anyway. I think that would definitely be the same with media consumption because it's becoming such a bigger issue yet nothing is being done about it...

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: I feel there's hope, like the EU, for example, already had some legislation that's much more of a proactive and liberal in their governance in the way the US is handling things like privacy and surveillance and data collection. I think eventually these types of laws will become more universal and other countries will adopt them, so we'll see what happens.

Jacob: So how do you feel FIREWALL was different or similar to some of your other pieces?

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: Well, I think at an experiential level, it's pretty different, right, sitting down at a computer at an internet cafe and conducting a search is totally different than looking at, say, a projection on a hand-made piece of glass that's reflective and almost ornate and decorative, but I think they are all stemming from the same place of asking questions, which is, how do we see. That's what my art is interested in, how we see, affects how we think of our world and ourselves and other people, and so whether it's a phenomenological concern of how we see light, how does that light bounce off a piece of glass, how do we see that light then on the wall, right? So that's maybe one direction that some of my studio pieces versus how do we understand say, a targeted people group that's portrayed by the government one way, but we might have a different relationship with a person of this group in real life that... That's something that maybe FIREWALL will get us to think about... I'm still trying to get people to think about how we see what are all the factors that influence the way we see something, and where is truth in that? So I think that's kind of the common thread through all of my work, and a lot of my studio pieces reference art history, and art history, similar to the internet, is only as good as the people who make it. And art history is only recorded by people in certain positions of power who are gatekeepers across an art world that is maybe not completely accessible, or fair, or equitable to all its people involved, and so art history has its own biases as well, and a lot of my studio pieces to get that.

Jacob: I was just curious about FIREWALL, 'cause I was thinking about it, is Baidu the website is that actually accessible or is it only accessible in China?

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: You can search Baidu.com anywhere in the world. Okay, there has been some debate between my developers and I, whether or not Baidu.com search from the US is as censored as Baidu.com search from within China. We have different opinions about it. We've never been able to conduct a test where we're searching Baidu for the same word, but from different places, and that's something I would love to investigate -- if I can code something that searches Baidu.com from an IP address in China, and also from an IP address in the US at the same time though, we can see actually if the results are exactly the same. My guess is that most search engine algorithms are affected by previous searches and by your location, what other people are searching around you, so I do think that it has the potential to produce different results, but I don't know that for a fact.

Jacob: Have you ever thought about expanding FIREWALLs so that it included other search engines to besides Baidu?

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: Yes, we get that question all the time because there are so many countries with restricted internet, you can think of countries in the Middle East, like Iran or countries like Cuba, where the Internet is practically non-existent, so we have definitely talked about it. But just from a technological standpoint, it's really difficult to design something like that, because of the search engine itself, so every time the search engine makes an update to their code, we have to modify ours and that's difficult enough to do with Baidu. So it would be even more difficult to do with other countries’ internet search engines. We haven't yet attempted that if we get lots of funding and lots of coders who want to participate, then maybe that's something we can do one day.

Jacob: Is there anything else that I missed that you think is important for people to understand about your work?

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: Not really. I guess the one thing I might add would be that more and more I'm realizing that the reason why I'm personally motivated as an artist to make this type of work is because I'm a trans-national artist is an American, but my heritage is Chinese and Taiwanese and... I've lived in many places, not just in America, and so being from different countries or being bi-cultural really shapes the perspective that I bring to my artwork and why I'm interested in bringing it. If you're only of one homogenous culture, language, and geography, then you have a very different mindset towards others than somebody like me, and I think that conversation is becoming more and more important, we're starting to see how one heritage really affects their world view, you can see it especially if you think about the movement right now with Black Lives Matter coming out of the pandemic and the protests, of all the police violence, these are people who have grown up with a very complex history where they were taken from their home culture and country to a new place, and then culturally imposed a social status. That really has been a disadvantage, as we start to think about these long histories of people, I think it's important to start recognizing how one's own identity might be that way, and so I think one thing maybe we haven't talked about yet, which is a big part of my work and I think it really colors the way I approach art-making.

Jacob: Thank you for taking the time out of your day to interview with me. I'm definitely a green grasshopper when it comes to interviewing, but I'm so glad that we were able to do this. I've learned a lot from your responses and definitely see things a little bit more differently. It's definitely reinforced some of what I have thought about just media in general, and how important it is because especially with the upcoming vote election, I think it's very important to watch what you're consuming.

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: Yeah, especially with these current debates, which are just like a zoo. Thank you for your time and for your interest in the work, and I'd be curious to see some of your work some time if you are willing to share over email or online.