Abstract
Amid escalating digital aesthetic convergence and algorithmic discipline, how can grassroots performance art become “visible”? Taking the online abstract performance artist Joseph Pang Mailang as a case study, this study examines how his “rough aesthetics” pierce mainstream narratives and platform discipline to generate a politically charged regime of perception. In doing so, it speaks directly to media-cultural scholarship on marginal voices, multimodal rhetoric, and platform governance. Methodologically, the study combines critical audiovisual rhetorical analysis with digital ethnography. It conducts semantic coding and visual deconstruction of Pang Mailang’s lyrics and music videos and supplements these findings with in-depth interviews with ten core audience members. The analysis integrates Jacques Rancière’s concept of the “distribution of the sensible,” Byung-Chul Han’s theory of the “smooth society,” and Henry Jenkins’s notion of participatory culture, thereby constructing a “roughness–heterogeneity–resistance” communicative trajectory. Results show that technical glitches, fragmented narratives, and counter-mainstream performances form a negative aesthetic strategy in which contingency and intentionality intertwine. Audiences’ multilayered readings of his “madness” persona expose the structural dilemma of resistance-through-visibility within traffic logics and the cultural gaze. This finding foregrounds a pressing cultural question: How can we decide whether roughness truly resists algorithmic aesthetic hegemony? The paper concludes that “roughness” in artistic production functions not only as a stylistic register but also as a cross-modal mechanism of power expression. By proposing a workable analytic path for decoding post-subcultural meaning in the digital age, the study—rooted in a grassroots narrative perspective—extends the communication research’s boundaries of abstract subcultural art under platform conditions.
Presenters
Kuan LiStudent, Master, Universiti Malaya, Johor, Malaysia Jiang Yu
College Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China Zhongshan Institute, Guangdong, China Chuan Jia Zhang
Student, Master, Hebei University of Science and Technology, Hebei, China
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Rough Aesthetics; Digital Subculture Studies; Algorithmic Discipline; Distribution of Sensible
