‘#ICantIDontUnderstand’ explores the practice of collective mourning and commemoration in digital space through the particular case of the death of Li Wenliang, a coronavirus whistleblower whose death triggered a public outpouring of grief and outrage in China. The work examines the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the collective will to commemorate a public event and transient information flows on Weibo. Materialising the online texts and images mourning Li’s death through collage, the work is an experimentation to visualise the ramifying structure of how this memory has developed in what Anna Reading calls the ‘globital memory field’.


Anna Reading, ‘Memory and Digital Media: Six Dynamics of the Globital Memory Field,’ in On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, eds. Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011, pp. 241-252.