Tracing the Origin of the Vulgar Aesthetic on Kuaishou: Undercurrents of Media Cultures between Northeast China and Hong Kong

Project: Research

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Description

This project will provide an ethnographic and historical account of the online videosubcultures on Kuaishou—a platform often characterised by its user base’ssocioeconomic marginality and an alternative media ecology. Founded in 2011, Kuaishouwas already the largest mobile-based short video platform in China in 2015 beforeTikTok/Douyin’s release. While TikTok took the global stage in 2017, Kuaishou built itssuccess predominantly as a regional platform on the margins of Chinese society—themajority of its users come from smaller cities and rural areas. The rural userbase,visually rural backdrops in its trending videos, humble backgrounds of Kuaishou’sprominent celebrities, and the uninhibited performances of intense emotions precipitatedwidespread debates on its aesthetics of vulgarity. Such an impression attracted attacksfrom Chinese intellectual critics and eventually state scrutiny targeting the platform andits influencers. In particular, Northeast China served as the regional backdrop ofKuaishou’s meteoric rise and incubator of Kuaishou’s idiosyncratic digital culture, butalso stereotypically blamed for Kuaishou’s identity of “vulgarity”. Previous approaches to Kuaishous’ alleged vulgarity have been bifurcated into either asimplistic dismissal of “low culture” or defending Kuaishou on the grounds that it offersmore than vulgarity and therefore is misunderstood. This project suggests re-examiningthe historical particularities embedded in the provincialized digital cultures andvernacular aesthetics. For this purpose, this project will investigate the origin ofsubcultures formed around Kuaishou through regional pre-internet media cultures ofNortheast China and how the region’s cultural imaginations of Hong Kong mediascapein the 90s are reincarnated as influential contemporary digital cultures. The proposed project will excavate the cultural and aesthetic genealogy between theHong Kong-influenced pioneering folk cultures in Northeast China in the 90s and thepresent-day vulgarisation of Northeast China as a phenomenon of provincial internetculture. In order to achieve this objective, this proposed project will conduct platformbaseddigital ethnography on Kuaishou, offline fieldwork in Northeast China, andarchival work in Hong Kong: all three parts of fieldwork and data collection willcontribute to the building of a publicly accessible database and an ethnographicdocumentary that help document the cultural objects of various video subcultures onKuaishou as well as theoretically situate the vulgar aesthetic in the past and presentNortheast China and Hong Kong mediascapes in three academic publications. 

Detail(s)

Project number9048288
Grant typeECS
StatusActive
Effective start/end date1/01/24 → …