The Aesthetics of Zipai: From Wechat Selfies to Self-Representation in Contemporary Chinese Art and Photography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Zipai, literally ‘self-shot’, is the Chinese word for ‘selfie’, and it indicates both the action and the product of taking a picture of oneself. This paper presents an account of the “ways of working” through which the authors – a media anthropologist and a performance artist – negotiated a collaborative approach to zipai. The essay begins with a discussion of contemporary practices of self-representation on Chinese digital media, arguing that the zipai uploaded by Chinese users on online platforms can be understood as locational and relational self-portraits, a media-specific genre of vernacular photography. It then proceeds to consider the ethical implications of appropriating vernacular photography for artistic and ethnographic representation, proposing to adapt the practice of filtering as an ethical intervention. After an overview of contemporary works by Chinese artists and photographers engaging with the aesthetics of zipai, the essay concludes with a reflection on the possibilities of collaboration between art practice and media anthropology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".