The Gray Area - Jinxin Guo

Mar 6 -10, 11am - 5pm
Mar 7, 11am - 8pm

Danmaku (弹幕) is a real-time scrolling comment system on video platforms, where viewers generate text comments that move across the screen, overlaying the video content. Danmaku culture emerged from this system as a new form of youth subculture and has become an important part of Chinese internet culture in recent years. However, as commercialization, algorithmic curation, and platform censorship intensify, Danmaku culture is undergoing a rapid and dramatic transformation. The Gray Area is an interactive media installation composed of projections and multiple translucent fabric nets. Grounded in autoethnographic research, the work is based on an archive of over a hundred Danmaku records that were collected from Bilibili, one of the world’s most influential Danmaku platforms. The projection displays the Danmaku content that has been permanently erased due to platform policies and censorship. They flicker and drift like digital ghosts, breaking apart, distorting, and fragmenting until they become unreadable. The space becomes a burial ground of digital erasure: the final resting place for censored speech, deleted histories, and displaced cultures. In an era of increasing information control, who decides what remains? As spaces for expression continue to shrink, how much do we still see and how much have we already forgotten?