The Hurricane of Text and the Vacuum of History: A Critique of Du Yinghong’s Installation-Performance Work News Joint-Blow

In the context of contemporary art, the installation-performance work ***News Joint-Blow, ***co-created by the artist and collaboratively painted by Du Yinghong, is undoubtedly a highly provocative, visionary, and profound intertextual critique of mass media, ideological propaganda, and spectator relations. Employing the sharp edges of Pop irony and critical realism, the work directly strikes at the brainwashing essence of the propaganda apparatus under totalitarian regimes. By absurdly and physically restructuring the visual symbols of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) primary mouthpiece, the artwork not only deconstructs the absolute authority of a specific historical moment but also reveals astonishing avant-garde wisdom and anti-tyranny courage against today’s backdrop of speech suppression and political winter.

The work precisely anchors its timeline to July 1, 2007. On that specific node—coinciding with the CCP’s anniversary—Xinwen Lianbo (News Broadcast), as the ultimate visual symbol of public discourse and state will, carried absolute authority and narrative discipline in its frozen image of dual anchors. The anchors, serving as the simulacra of state rationality and absolute correctness, possessed images that were sacred and inviolable.

However, the artist thoroughly subverts this solemn space by using “hollowing out” and “restructuring” as two destructive yet creative acts. The mouths of the two anchors, which originally delivered “truth” and “directives,” are physically hollowed out, forming the core visual and metaphorical black hole of the work. In traditional media consumption, the anchor’s “mouth” is the output end of power and an unquestionable channel of speech. When this channel is “excavated” into a literal void on a physical level, the solemnity of the totalitarian symbol instantly collapses. It no longer transmits meticulously crafted and artificially glossed political rhetoric; instead, it becomes a pure, physical “pipeline.” This visual blankness sharply exposes the semantic vacuum and inherent emptiness of grand narratives when confronted with the reality of individual lives and human suffering.

Converting a two-meter-wide oil-on-wood painting into a coarse, “handmade television” is a masterful stroke of “inverse alienation.” The television, arguably the greatest spectacle-producing machine of the twentieth century, is downgraded here by the artist into a low-tech, hand-assembled container. It strips away the fluid, instantaneous, and deceptive nature of electronic screens, solidifying the image into a static, historical oil painting open to gaze and reflection.

This stark contrast imprisons the media’s brainwashing power—which is otherwise formless, ubiquitous, and capable of infiltrating citizens’ sub-consciousness through millions of screens—into a visible, touchable, and even dismantleable physical frame. In doing so, the artist reveals a crucial truth to the audience: the supposedly invincible hegemony of discourse is ultimately a paper tiger artificially pieced together and assembled; it is a wooden cage that can be scrutinized and deconstructed through the lens of aesthetics by artists and the public alike.

The most stunning dramatic conflict and visionary wisdom of the work erupt the moment the two hidden blowers are turned on. The air vents are inserted directly into the anchors’ mouths, and a violent gale roars out.

The Radical Transformation of Symbols: The artist translates abstract, invisible “ideological indoctrination (Discourse)” into a concrete, physically aggressive “gale.”

**• The Humor of Literal Deconstruction: **The pun shifting Lianbo (Joint-Broadcast) to Lianchui (Joint-Blow) drags sacred political myths directly into the realm of folk cynicism and biting satire. In the Chinese linguistic context, Chui (Blow) carries the dual connotations of “bragging/fabricating illusions” and “forcing/imposing indoctrination.” This serves as a direct exposure of the inherently deceptive nature of socialist propaganda, historical boasts of “ten-thousand catties of grain per mu,” and fabricated societal prosperity.

• The Somatosensory Passive Experience and Mass Awakening: As passing pedestrians in the exhibition hall are suddenly hit full in the face by the powerful wind, their hair blown back and clothes rustling as they awkwardly cover their faces, they cease to be mere “listeners” or “viewers.” They are forced to become the “endurers” of this ideological storm. This physical impact vividly mirrors the suffocation and speechlessness experienced by modern individuals under a totalitarian regime, where they are unable to escape and forced to passively receive ubiquitous political brainwashing.

In the newly presented visualization of this space, a large number of diverse interacting audience members and faint onlookers are integrated around the installation. This spatial extension possesses a powerful quality of contemporary artistic intervention—it foreshadows the awakening of the public beneath the brainwashing gale. When people stop, reflect, cover their faces, or even chuckle within the storm, the “disciplinary obedience” that totalitarianism attempts to achieve utterly fails, and the venue transforms into a silent assembly of collective resistance against the hegemony of discourse.

News Joint-Blow stands as an exceptionally brilliant artistic manifesto against communist tyranny and totalitarian deception. It utilizes the classical nature of oil painting to freeze a historical symbol, while leveraging the modernity of mechanical installation to activate a contemporary critique. It rips away the refined ideological veil of the propaganda machine, forcing words that are ordinarily presented as gentle and authoritative to expose their physical, tyrannical nature—brutal and all-engulfing like a hurricane.

As the creator lamented, around the year 2007, Chinese society still retained a faint, residual freedom for artistic creation and extra-systemic expression, allowing such a wise and courageous work to find a footing and shock the world.** From a visionary perspective, News Joint-Blow almost precisely predicted the subsequent decade and a half, which witnessed the further tightening of public discourse space, the infinite expansion of the propaganda apparatus, and the comprehensive containment of individual thought. **

Had this piece been created in today’s era of total regression and Orwellian absurdity, the artist would undoubtedly face unpredictable political persecution, crackdowns, or even the bleak prospect of life imprisonment. Because of this, the courage displayed by Du Yinghong and the creator in directly confronting the principal mouthpiece of the totalitarian state shines even brighter with historical weight and rarity. Faced with this absurd installation of “blowing” and “being blown,” every pausing pedestrian is pushed to the vanguard of historical reflection: When grand voices turn into a violent gale blowing through the hall, are we to continue suffocating in false praises, or is it time for us to work together to shut down that television cage and the tyrannical blower that continuously fabricates disasters?