In 1998 artist Wu Wenguang walked into a tent in a park in a small Chinese town. The tent accommodated 12 "singers" and "dancers," who were peasants from a poverty-stricken village in central China's Henan Province.

Over the next two years he lived with the "gypsies" as they performed pop songs and simple dances in small towns and city suburbs.

With a hand-sized digital video camcorder he made a documentary entitled Lakes and Rivers, that shocked the world at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival.

The digital video (DV) art, which appeared in 1995 with Sony's introduction of the world's first digital video camcorder, is one of several areas of contemporary art in which Chinese artists have kept pace with their foreign counterparts.

Like Wu, around one million owners of DV camcorders in China, priced at around 20,000 yuan (US$2,400), make their own plays, documentaries, video arts and record events in their lives.

A national survey is currently taking place on the development of DV arts in China.

The survey, by the film research center of the Beijing Film Academy and sponsored by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, involves universities, individual DV owners and about 100 television stations across the country.

It is expected to result in new regulations, which will make it easier for DV works to be broadcast on television.

Entering the mainstream

Important DV works appeared in China about six years ago.

In that year, college student Wang Fen turned the lens on her parents, who told her about their difficult marriage.

Their private life became known throughout the country when Wang released her documentary They Are Not the Only Unhappy Couple on the Internet.

Among the DV works of the period, including Wu's Lakes and Rivers, the college girl's has been most controversial as it was painfully close to life and sober, but was also rude in terms of its intrusion into people's private lives.

Because of the controversial issues and the poor picture and sound quality of some early works, major television stations and film producers simply dismissed them as "amateurish."

The pioneers therefore have to use unorthodox methods to get their works to their audience, sending them as attachments in e-mails, showing them in Internet forums and sometimes exhibiting them in bars and cafes.

However, the number of "amateurs" has witnessed a massive boom over the past three years, and the professionals were surprised to see and forced to accept that "anyone can make his/her own films."

The survey by the Beijing Film Academy shows there were one million DV camcorders in China at the end of 2003, and the number is expected to increase by 30 per cent every year, said Liu Jun, professor with the academy.

College students born in the 1980s have been the most active DV users in China, he added.

DV works began to enter the mainstream last year, when Chinese television stations and research institutes held about 10 symposia and contests on the digital art.

The 2004 Beijing International DV Forum, which will take place in May, will be a major event intended to bring DV works to a wider audience, said Liu Xiaoning, director of the Gehua DV Research Centre which is hosting the forum.

An exhibition will take place during or immediately after the forum at the Millennium Art Museum at China Millennium Monument in Beijing.

The DV works displayed at the exhibition will also be shown on major Chinese websites including Sina.com and Sohu.com.

The show will be a review of DV works made after the art form appeared in China, said Liu.

Student artists

A large part of the exhibition at the Millennium Art Museum will feature works by students, said Liu Xiaoning.

Wanma Caidan from the Beijing Film Academy has been one of the most famous student artists.

Last year he produced The Silent Mani Stone, which showed the dreams and sense of inferiority of a silent teenage boy called Xu Kai.

In a documentary titled Mine Workers, 20-year-old Zhang Hongfeng recorded a Chinese New Year celebrated by his aunt's family.

The family members were mainly workers digging coal from dangerous, illegal, privately owned mines in North China's Shanxi Province.

In an experimental video artwork titled Beijing Metro, 21-year-old Xu Yiliang showed the mundane lives of commuters on the Beijing metro.

"The young were creative, but I don't believe an audience can watch more than five of their works," said Professor Liu Jun.

Most stories were similar, and the pictures were usually blurred because of the shaky hands holding camcorders.

The audience often had a hard job finding the main subject's head at the corner of pictures.

The person's voice could be loud in the first few minutes, but would then become extremely low in the next.

The poor picture and sound quality have led to the end of the popular program "DV era" on the Hong Kong-based Phoenix Satellite TV station, said Liu Jun.

The weekly program, launched in November 2002, was the only mainstream stage for Chinese DV artists.

Though greatly welcomed by teenagers, it was recently cancelled for the lack of advertisements.

No camcorder producers, including Sony and Panasonic, would put advertisements on the program.

They claimed their products could achieve much better picture and sound quality than those of broadcast works.

Liu said the poor quality mainly resulted from the young artists' hasty production of the DV works.

"The development of DV art in China is similar to the development of the Internet," said Zhou Yu, a student of the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

"The pioneers of DV art pursue it mainly out of love. But for the followers it is a route to potential fame and fortune," said the 20-year-old.

Besides picture and sound quality, there are a lot more problems to be solved if more DV works are to be broadcast on television.

"Many works are documents of true lives rather than performances of professional actors and actresses. As in They Are Not the Only Unhappy Couple issues of privacy and morality can arise," said Liu Jun.

Copyright is also an issue. Since it is difficult for an individual to make music, many DV works borrow music from blockbuster films like Titanic or pop stars like Michael Jackson.

(China Daily April 5, 2004)