Miao Ying's Blind Spot (2007)
is an 1869-page Mandarin dictionary
that has been manually annotated to indicate
2,000 search terms that were censored in China at the time.
To make the list, Miao took on the labor-intensive task of
searching every word on google.cn.
If the search results
returned with “According to local laws,
some search results are not showing,”
in the bottom of the page, Miao would erase the word with white tape.
The words on Miao's list are sometimes predictable terms related to politics or religion.
Other times they are surprising, words that had been flagged temporarily for indiscernable reasons.
Blind Spot (2007) is a meditation on the conditions of the Chinese internet,
particularly on the experience of the country's heavy censorship.
The work also comments
on the human labor required
for those who maintain
the apparatus
of regulatory
state control,
and of
those
subject
to it.