In Search of Paradise Lost

This article was published in the Holiday Issue of Citizen LA magazine, December 11 2008


The Santa Fe art colony lies buried beneath a layer of concrete. Just like Pompeii lived in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius, the colony is eclipsed by a cement factory that force- feeds soot into the air. The quarry yard of the cement factory is out of sight out and of mind thanks to a chain -linked fence separating the world of harmful commerce from a peaceful artist commune. Arriving at this insulated community I immediately felt separated from the rest of the city, reminding me that I was not in Santa Fe, New Mexico but on Santa Fe Avenue in Downtown, Los Angeles.
The colony, formerly used as a mattress factory, is a group of ominous stone buildings, flanked by burgundy bungalows and lined with potted plants and flowers all maintained by the artists. The building is what Tyler Durden’s house could have looked like on Paper Street if he and his posse from Project Mayhem had done a little yard work. A Proustian conundrum exists here, searching for lost time in the face of a paradise that is rapidly decaying. The artists living on site are reminded of the expansion of industry each day as they ingest polluted air from the factory. The health risks however do not stop these artists from creating new works and enjoying time with their families as I learned four babies have already born in the colony.
Lisa Adams, a resident of Santa Fe, leads us into her shared studio space where industrial strength poster board, held together by clear packing tape, divides the room. Leopard reading glasses are thrown across a glass palette surrounded by tape, thinners, brushes, and paints. Although many of the books look more like pieces to a jigsaw puzzle than a personal library, Adams’ studio is impeccably clean and organized. She wears Levi jeans with paint so deeply embedded in the memory of the cotton fibers that no rinse cycle will ever clean them. These jeans have witnessed first hand years of epiphanies and creative breakdowns.
Some of the works for her January upcoming show The Future of Paradise Past at the Lawrence Asher Gallery hang on the wall of her studio, waiting for their final inspection. The paintings were infused with vitality and were more visually arresting in her studio than on my Macintosh monitor.
Adams explains that the narrative of her show is, “almost nether-world Ground Zero, less than an Edenic kind of world. So it’s sort of almost like,” she pauses and adds, “apocalyptic might be a little too extreme but it’s twisted enough so you can kind of get that life persists, the life is driven to persist but it somehow is thwarted.” Los Angeles, especially the Santa Fe art colony is an urban anomaly that rectifies Adam’s theme of nature competing with industry. The graffiti aesthetics adopted for “We Destroyed the Things We Loved,” suggests the destruction happens inside the studio and outside on the streets.
“We Destroyed the Things We loved” presents the duality of aesthetics encountered when viewing industry versus nature. The painting depicts an electric blue iceberg, partially fractured, floating in crisp Arctic water. A web of vines arcs over the ice and conceals the tip of the iceberg. Large bubble letters outlined with black spray paint interrupt the natural movement of the iceberg and make it a static image hidden behind graffiti. The lettering looked familiar to me because a roach coach turned in front of me the same day I received a copy of the painting. The graffiti style, similar to the lettering on the truck, reflected an air of authentic L.A.- one that showcases Adams’ deep connection to the fabric of the city in which she has spent her entire artistic career.
In discussing the aforementioned painting Adams reveals that, “on a lot of those roach coaches…you’ve got this what I would call kinda high amateur level painting and then you’ve got this tag on it and it’s sort of awesome…” As Adams reminiscences about spray painting over the iceberg, she continues, “ I was so fucked up trying to put the tagging on it.” While she speaks to me she paints in mid-air, her right hand coils as if it was holding a paintbrush as she transforms dead space into a canvas.
Adams’ The Future of Paradise Past insists that nature is ever looming. The city is a palimpsest; years of tagging and decay conceal a narrative driven by the notion that urbanity is most unexpected. Just like a flower growing up from the concrete depths of a splintered sidewalk, or the vines you often encounter when passing beneath a freeway, what we uncover are artifacts of a natural history. Adams describes this as the, “combative idea between the nature that wants to kind of take over.” The painted vines arching around the iceberg in, “We Destroyed the Things We Loved,” reflect Adams’ fascination with something growing from nothing. They remind her of “vines just dangling down into mid-air, [that] you don’t even know how they got there.”
Working in near isolation, Lisa Adams constructs pseudo-utopian paintings while concrete swallows the world beyond her wall of windows. Despite this resentment of her urban environment, Adams is thankful for places like the Santa Fe Art Colony, a true example of a flower rising up from the depths of an urban jungle. “I’m not rich,” she explains, but “the art world in some way has provided me a way to experience and to express what I think are the two things that are most important to me.” 28 years of working in Los Angeles as a painter, teacher, curator, and public artist inextricably binds Lisa Adams to the urban tapestry of a city where something always seems to grow from nothing.

Here, There, and Gone

Review of Julian Hoeber's recent show "All that is Solid Melts into Air"



The present decays. I watch a metamorphosis take place before my eyes. Facial contortions force wounds to break skin in all directions. Destruction gives birth to a new face shedding amalgamated materials and complete disarray. I witness the birth of a head, shedding from its own skin, struggling to leave wreckage behind. Julian Hoeber’s recent exhibit All that is Sold Melts into Air contends that the body is a battleground, a site of damage, and affliction, decaying with the passage of time and imprisoned by its own materiality.
Gallery 1 of Julian Hoeber’s third show at Blum & Poe features fifteen compositions of identical size and technique. Cold concrete floors and institutionalized, fluorescent lighting make Hoeber’s monochromatic spiral designs disorienting and difficult to assess.

Splintered forms bleed from the center of collapsing concentric circles so that we cannot decipher where the form begins or end. The artist describes the trompe l’oeil effect employed as “painting with psychology pushing through the surface like the ribcage of a decaying corpse.” This maze and/or dizzying paintings "decay like a human corpse" we experience duration, age, trying to unravel their mystery as if standing before a corpse and watching it decompose. How long can we bear to stand here?

Some of the drawings reference the human body- found objects like a urinal à la Duchamp, a single breast, the body is in the toilet, and everything has gone to shit. Pencil drawings left behind in an elementary school classroom years ago are unraveled, the torn edges straightened. The subjects: a bride and groom, both are crying because the institution of marriage is dead. Your Body is a Battleground reveals Hoeber’s painterly psychology in his assessment and dissemination of the human form.

Thought bubbles are crudely borrowed from Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s comic –book- style silk screens. The relationship between the textual and painted components of the art object deepen because the meaning is recovered in fragility/ dependent upon signage/ a system of language. The first bubble reads “(sigh)…” and the thought connects somewhere to the inner rings of the circle. The next thought reads, “Your Bdoy is a—Btlateguround.” The words are not legible without the proper spelling supplied on the wall below. We understand misspellings and the words make sense even though they should not. Hoeber’s playful and intentional manipulation of the declaration “Your Body is a Battleground” reminds the viewer that his drawings are but a mere surface crumbling before our eyes like the “ribcage of a decaying corpse.”

The sentence is not grammatically correct, but we understand it because we can codify the letters, rearrange them, and help them to make sense because the artist has failed to do so. The show makes spectacle of the literal decay of materiality, and infuses “histoire”/ "his story" the personal history of the artist who explains that his influences run deep and he is like a tube that internalizes information and spits it out again. So the show is a personal history that examines the place of his art, the status of art objects, right now in this moment.
The jagged arrangement of ten bronze-cast heads positioned at angles on glass podiums confronts the weight of ideas.

The significance of heads as ideas/ thoughts/ that cannot or will not be contained during this administration, during this global crisis, they are made of solid materials but they are the vestiges of explosive ideas. Are we really living in this time? When our ideas cannot sustain themselves and therefore vanish into thin air? The weight of our thoughts causes them to melt under an oppressive cloud.

Each head is untitled but they are all united by their use of materials; polished bronze with stainless steel posts, MDF, wood, acrylic mirror and spray enamel. They are also unified in their aggressive handling by the artist as they have been shot, beaten, and bitten. At first Hoeber’s sculptures appear like relics unearthed from Roman ruins because the use of bronze-cast alludes to permanence long gone. The Roman notion of the traditional function of a sculpture was to preserve an image of a leader that was young, powerful, and noble. We don’t make bust heads out of our leaders anymore because we don’t want to remember them. In approaching each head the viewer confronts foreheads scarred by bullets, skulls that have been ripped a part and haphazardly stitched back together, and gaping holes that begin at the nose and continue straight to the back of the head granting unlimited access for the viewer to survey their external and internal construction. Hoeber reveals that there are no more thoughts left inside of these heads- they were too explosive to be contained within a solid surface. Thinking outside of the box is not rewarded in this gallery. The mirrored podiums function not only to support the heads but they reflect the limbs of the viewer as they investigate each disfigured relic. The mirrors make us imagine that the decaying heads belong to our own body and for a moment they become a part of us. Hoeber’s careful placement of the heads on the mirrors stresses his contention that the past continues to decay in the present. Hoeber explains that he is a relic, “one that believes in old forms and old ideas, or at least inundated with them. And these forms and ideas are dying.”
Julian Hoeber’s decision to designate identical materials to his drawings in Gallery 1 and bronze cast heads in Gallery 2 reveals All that is Solid Melts into Air as the unearthing of the personal history of the artist. The works will soon decay themselves; their materials will eventually fade and comment on an artist who considered himself a relic. A sense of art history is there. A working knowledge of politics and social abandonment is somewhere else. The mind is gone. All scattered on the gallery floor. The human form is the final vestige; a living relic vacant of thought or even capable of holding onto it…

…Perhaps I too should melt into air…



To view the show in its entirety please visit Blum and Poe's site

I can't get myself arrested... maybe that will help me finally get a job

His pores expelled something foul. Egomania has a funny way of smelling just like desperation. The constant clicking of his cheap pen filled the room. I noticed that the fluorescent lighting throbbed overhead, dimming occasionally. I would later wish I had prayed for a power outage instead of an interview for a self-degrading entry- level position. I sat politely on the edge of my chair waiting for the interview to begin. He said nothing his thumb did all the talking… his right thumb twitched nervously clicking the top of his pen open and shut several thousand times per minute.
CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK!
The sound erased the noise of my own thoughts, gently easing me in a temporary coma where it felt all right to stare blankly at objects and wonder why they become blurrier the longer I forgot to blink.

I felt my face to make sure that my fake plastic- I’ll-fuck-anyone-in-Hollywood –to-make-my first million smile was still plastered in place.

The first 15 minutes of my interview at one of Hollywood’s leading offices was spent watching the head of Human Resources lament over the format of my resume. “Ooookkkk…so you only earned an overall GPA of 3.5?” this troubled him so he kept his head down low and continued reading the top line of my resume. The clicking continued. CLICK CLICK. He never looked up at me when he spoke; instead his beady eyes pierced the page searching for more ways to humiliate me. He continued, “well that’s not very impressive, it’s certainly not a 4.0. Get rid of it.”

He stopped fingering his pen for a moment and with the same determination as a high school student confidently fills in a bubble with the “correct” answer on the SAT; my GPA disappeared in a blizzard of blue ink. He was relentless.

“Oh I see you made Dean’s List… but only once. Well… If you had made Dean’s List say… CLICK CLICK…. 8 times then maybe I would consider keeping it… so.. CLICK… lose this too.” And one more thing, “why would you include the fact that you attended the Annenberg School of Communication? It’s too much for me to read, all that matters is you got a degree. Yeah, definitely get rid of this.”
This man is a certifiable moron. The Annenberg School is one of the most highly esteemed Communication schools in the country and I worked like a slave just to get in. Mr. Blue Pen must be right that by including this minor piece of information on my resume would it would result in remaining terminally jobless.

Within five minutes all of my collegiate efforts had been erased by a man too small to fit into his own suit sitting in an office too small to house his ego and displayed a gross admiration for a blue pen.

“See it should like this,” he explained in the way insensitive teachers make their students feel like peons, as he turned his computer monitor toward me with his own resume already pulled up. The metal tip of his pen stung the screen as he moved it along each section to punctuate my own inability to construct a proper resume. He wanted to make it perfectly clear that his god-given resume was better than any USC business class or staffing agency could have prepared me for. “And another thing, I don’t like your header, it needs to be more centered and balanced. I find that it’s distracting, not very easy to read. It should look like this,” turning the screen toward me again. Was this really my interview? I finally got a word in, “I was just following the format given to me by my professors. I’m perfectly fine with making these changes and sending you a revised draft.” Perhaps I was overextending myself a bit with that offer. “What do professors and staffing agencies know anyway?” He said that with a nauseating air of superiority.

“My resume is the best and I work at the best company in Hollywood. How else do you think I got to be so successful at such a young age?” I pretended to be impressed and nodded. I did get to thinking after the interview it was suspicious he was working for the Human Resources department at the “peak” of his Hollywood career.

Eddie Izzard said it’s 70% how you look, 20% how you act, and only 10% of what you say. Maybe that doesn’t ring entirely true for an interview but I agree that how you look or (how you think you may look) is half the battle. In keeping with his theory I always make sure my clothes are impeccably clean, no creases, and before I am out the door I manage to run a lint roller over my body at least a dozen times. When I get dressed for interviews I like to dress in black. It looks like I’m going to a funeral, who knows, I don’t really care. Johnny Cash knew what he was doing. When I’m dressed in black I am only further reminded that I truly have nothing to lose. If I walk in without a job the worst thing that can happen is that I leave without a job.
The graduating class of 2008 has been hit with a case of absolutely miserable timing. No anecdote uttered at our commencement ceremonies would have hinted at the misery that would later become of us.

We walk in the shadows of uncertainty, hand-in-hand with a government as unpredictable as the DOW Jones whose “transition” into a new administration is as critical as it has been since the Great Depression.

All this coupled with the fact that companies are firing their employees by the thousands and all in due time for the holiday season. If the economy continues on this losing streak we may wake up to find that automotive companies cease to exist. The wildly unstable economic infrastructure however is no match for our own youthful cynicism and lofty ambition. We are products of the “you can do anything” parenting practice.

We were nurtured to the point of near-suffocation and overprotected because our west side private schools helped us believe that there were no real losers and everyone was special. As much as we would like to think this is true later in life we have hit a wall. Or at least I have.

Here is my first big chance. Suddenly traveling through Europe solo pales in comparison to the reality that I must find a way to support myself when all the odds are against me. How will I find a way to pay for medication, auto insurance, rent, groceries, and utilities? Do I take the first job I am offered on account that the stock market looks like it’s suffering from severe cardiac trauma, or do I continue to wait for the chance of an interview for a job I may not even get? Am I destined to live with my parents forever?
I thought a degree from a leading private university was my ticket to the rest of the world. When I graduated in May I did not think that I would still be unemployed in November. I find myself scouring Craig’s List at least ten times a day, highlighting ads in the classified sections of the LA Weekly, Media Bistro, and the Daily Variety. In the past week alone I have submitted my resume to over 30 art galleries as a gallery assistant and over a dozen publications pitching myself as a freelance writer. The good news is a paid freelance writing job did come out of that exhausting search. However I am not being paid enough to cover a single bottle of prescription medicine. Unlike the 50 some-odd jobs I applied for in entertainment where I was never notified that a position had been filled, directors of art galleries and publications actually take the time to reply to my query one way or another. Job -hunting is exempt to the phrase “no news is good news” and I am grateful to those who reached out so I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Although I find it almost hard to believe, jobs are available and the real problem is the competitive market place that’s narrowing at a rate faster than we can count the jobs lost.

The process feels similar to applying for college- both are equally illusive, confusing, exhausting, and altogether surreal experiences. Is there really a job out there that’s right for me?

A four- year-degree is just a pre-requisite for nearly all of the positions I have applied for in publishing, the arts, and entertainment. All that hard work to earn the coveted Bachelors degree just helps you to fit in with the rest of the applicants. After the interview with Human Resources and the blue pen I returned home and once the aggravation wore off I realized that I was walking a tightrope between surrendering to the corporate world of office politics and pursuing a job in art, following exhibits and writing about them. I decided not to pursue any further interviews in entertainment and now spend my time attending exhibits at museums and galleries, writing reviews, and submitting them to art magazines. I take myself a bit more seriously as a writer and consider what I am doing more meaningful than taking years of abuse just so I can climb the corporate ladder.

I'm a Closet Rock Star

My first guitar looked more like a toy than an actual instrument. In 1990 I was four years old, and my dad (an avid guitar player and collector) bought me a white Jr. Pro Stratocaster powered by a battery operated Marshall mini amp. As my interest in music matured and my guitar skills became more defined I graduated to cooler, louder, and more beautiful guitars that I use to write songs and experiment with on Garage Band and Protools. My dad’s profound appreciation and respect for his guitars helped me to understand them as an expression of art. The ability to play music is a beautiful gesture that I will carry with me the rest of my life.


I call our house a gallery. There’s an original Beatles “Help” poster framed outside of my room, while the Richard Avedon Beatle lithographs from Life magazine help to define our living room. Posters and paintings are not the only pieces of art that adorn the walls of our house; the guitars that hang on the walls thematically define each room. My dad has taught me to revere guitars as works of art that you can pick up and play anywhere in our house. He never believed in sterilizing his guitars by keeping them locked in cases and hidden from the light of day. His belief that guitars are living, breathing works of art, has nurtured my own appreciation of music.


Last year I was employed by a guitar company as a free-lance writer to create their web copy and assist with artist relations. I loved my job because I was surrounded by creative musicians who believed in the power of quality instruments and were awed by music in the same child-like way was as my dad. Each artist that I worked with company had a unique voice and their musical styles spanned from traditional blues to rock. In working with these artists, many of whom were unsigned I realized that being a musician is only half of the battle. An artist needs to have an image to sell their records and help labels make money.

Where do you draw the line between artistic integrity and selling out? Without an image there are no sales, no sold out world tours… there is only music playing in coffee shop performances.

As a musician I get easily discouraged having worked on the corporate, marketing end of entertainment. I get frustrated by the overbearing capitalistic mentality in music because all I see are power-hungry corporate mongers who control their artists like marionettes and don’t really care about the quality of music being produced.

Being a musician isn’t just about the heavy-handed power chord strum patterns, or how low you can wear your guitar while your black converse shoes keep the beat. Musicianship is only half the battle in the music industry which is why I’m content living my life as a media-junky skateboarder during the day, and a hard- core musician at night.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

With record sales in the United States sinking into an abyss of “free ware” fueled by services like Napster and Limewire, musicians are finding alternative ways to establish revenue. Western music is looking to the East to play live shows, and capitalize from merchandise and technology. Peter Grosslight, worldwide head of music for the William Morris Agency believes that “China is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. There are 1.3 billion people there. It’s becoming a much wealthier place. How can we ignore that?” According to “For all the Rock in China” printed in Sunday’s New York Times, China has come to embrace Western music again as they “were once largely closed to foreign music, but the country has gradually loosened it’s restrictions,” and has thereby become a necessary destination for pop music.


Chinese youth have embraced such acts as the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, Beyoncé, Eric Clapton, Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, and Sonic Youth with sold-out venues and fierce energy. Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s explains the thrill of performing in Beijing as "like nothing we’ve done before. From the very beginning they were hungry for us.” Despite the staggering attendance at shows, the Chinese music industry depends on sponsors and not artists to pay for concerts. The cost of ticket prices is extremely low as anything higher than $6 or $7 is considered expensive for many young Chinese music fans. Therefore sponsors like Diesel, Motorola, and Levi’s not only promote their brand during a concert, but their sponsorship is necessary to fund a concert. P.T. Black a partner in Jigsaw International understands the power of brands in China,

In the US an artist becomes big, and then a brand latches on to borrow their credibility. There are virtually no artists who have more credibility than brands. Coke is a lot cooler than any young musician in China today.

The US is like a factory site where pop stars are born and meticulously manufactured so that they will have greater appeal both for sponsors and audiences. China is less concerned with a quality band and hopes to increase the popularity of a sponsor in association with music venue.
Recall my previous blog “Shrinking Giants” where I discussed the role of Communist censorship laws that are still practiced in China. Because a reporter forwarded the government’s adamant request that reporters should not cover the 15th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square to a pro-democracy, he was imprisoned for 10 years. The music industry is also censored and carefully controlled by the Chinese government. Any band that performs at a venue above club level is subject to the scrutiny of the Ministry of Culture and its subsequent censors. The Ministry examines

Every lyric on a CD and every song planned for a live performance must be approved to obtain the necessary permit for a concert or retail release of an album. Approval can take months and the Ministry has a way of undercutting the best-laid plans of global promotional campaigns.

What is more important to a musician- playing sold out concerts in China where lyrics and every minutia of your set is scrutinized or playing in a small club where you are free to play your music as you intended it? As an artist I cannot easily understand why so many US music groups are willing to hand over their creativity to the Chinese Ministry. The discrepancy between the band’s China sponsors and the music they actually sell illustrates the point that China is only out to make a profit… even if that means disrupting a global marketing plan along the way.


Linkin Park played in Shanghai to a sold-out stadium of 25,000 however China has not yet released their CD. Even tours from Nine Inch Nails, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Sonic Youth have not resulted in the Chinese division of Universal records to release their records. According to the Chinese labels “piracy has made the effort futile.” The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimates that 85% of the CD’s sold in China are counterfeit. Given that many of the tracks “rejected” from the Ministry turn around to become huge hits elsewhere, is it realistic for bands to depend on record sales in China? Although certain artists are not available on the shelves in Chinese record stores, they are most likely accessible to every young Chinese fan with access to the Internet.

The 12-Step Program for the Web-addicted

South Korea is seriously wired- no other country has incorporated the Internet quite as heavily and dramatically into their culture. According to a recent New York Times article “In Korea, a boot camp cure for web obsession” statistics reveal the extent of South Korea’s technological immersion. It is approximated that,

90% of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the ‘PC Bang,’ dim Internet parlors that sit on practically every street corner.

The escapism of the cyber world and its encroachment upon reality has resulted in many Internet users enjoying “their success and popularity in the virtual world more than the real one.” The United States and other countries recognize the addictive component of the Internet and identify “compulsive Internet use” as a mental health issue. The video gaming industry is internationally profitable and is proof that video games are a cultural phenomenon. Microsoft’s Halo 3 grossed $300 million during its first week alone, eclipsing any Hollywood blockbuster that we have ever revered as sensational. South Korea is facing a serious problem however. The entire nation is Internet-capable and has resulted in of its citizens many becoming addicted to cyberspace.


Ahn Dong-hyun, a child psychiatrist reveals, “up to 30% of South Koreans under 18, or about 2.4 million people are at risk for Internet addiction. They spend at least two hours a day online usually playing games or chatting.” I know I am not alone when I confess that I easily spend two hours per day logged on the Internet conducting research for my courses, or taking a study break and browsing Facebook and Myspace. When I’m not near my computer I’m constantly navigating through the features on my Iphone or Ipod. I suppose I am “web obsessed” but I feel that the more accurate diagnosis of my technological attachments is more related to the kinetic flow of information in our culture. The problem South Korea faces isn’t Internet users like me, but

Up to a quarter million who show signs of an actual addiction, like an inability to stop themselves from using computers, rising levels of tolerance that drive them to seek even longer online sessions, and withdrawal symptoms.

Cyberspace is the new drug for the youth of the 21st century- there are no drugs and there is no alcohol there is only corporations and manufacturers of technological devices.


The aggressive use of the Internet in South Korea has been met with an equally aggressive remedy for the addiction. The government has built a

Network of 140 Internet-addiction counseling centers, in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and the recently established Internet Rescue Camp.

The Camp is a site to treat the most severe cases of addiction, which researchers have concluded is overwhelmingly male. Internet Rescue Camp is paid for entirely by the government, as they must repair the addiction that they have made so easily available to their young citizens. The camp prohibits the use of computers and limits the time participants can spend on cell phones as they too can be used to access the Internet. A counselor explains the importance of physical activity, as “it is most important to provide them with experience of a lifestyle without the Internet. Young Koreans don’t know what this is like.”


The Internet is not only a site for addiction but crime. Mycrimespace, which takes its name from Myspace is devoted to providing information about crime on the Internet and current activity in cyberspace. MSNBC's Dateline has conducted extensive investigations about pedophiles that seek out minors in chat rooms and engage them in sexually explicit dialogue. To Catch a Predator teamed up with Perverted Justice to track down and arrest child predators. Additionally there have been many reported Myspace suicides, and users dropping dead from exhaustion after playing online games for days on end. It seems that the power and capabilities of the Internet can easily be perverted and abused, resulting in treatment for child predators and web-maniacs alike. Although the inane number of hours many South Koreans spend online is detrimental to their health, it is not as alarming as the temptation into cyber space. Online we establish user names and profiles that reveal a carefully constructed profile of our cyber persona. Perhaps the real cause for concern in South Korea especially is that users can better cope with the world through the prism of cyber space. On the Internet there are no inhibitions, there are no limits, and time ceases to exist.

Shrinking Giants

Corporate heavyweights Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and Yahoo continue to introduce technologies that make Internet features such as web browsing and email faster, and more portable. However recent news of the 2004 imprisonment of Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning in China has many people pointing their fingers at Yahoo and not the journalists as the real criminals. The case invites suspicion of industry giants who have unrestricted access to their clients’ personal email information. Furthermore Yahoo’s willingness to release Shi Tao’s private emails over to the authorities is alarming because the Internet is an unknowable terrain littered with booby traps. Thus we are unintentionally subscribing to the invisible constitution of the World Wide Web, and signing up for a free email address can result in selling our souls to the industry giants that control email servers.


According to the Chronicle Washington Bureau, Shi Tao, an editorial department head at the Contemporary Business News in the Hunan Province of China was convicted of releasing state secrets using his Yahoo email address. On April 20, 2004, the Chinese government ordered that the news media not write about the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Tao disobeyed and forwarded the government’s order to a pro-democracy group. In March 2005 Tao was convicted and given a 10 -year sentence. Yahoo’s willingness to release Tao’s emails to the Hong Kong office of Yahoo China and their cooperation with the Chinese government is raising suspicion among many free speech groups. Reporters without borders, a French press freedom organization explained that they “already knew Yahoo collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and we know it is a Chinese police informant as well.” An ethical consideration in the case is the tightrope that Yahoo and other industry leaders must walk when complying with the laws of the countries in which they are operating. China’s Communist rule enforces censorship laws, but should Yahoo assume the role of playing God in their Chinese Internet market? Is it the Internet server’s duty to turn over confidential information to the government?


Yahoo is deeply invested in the success of their expansion into the Chinese marketplace. It is reported that in 2005, Yahoo “sold its interest in Yahoo China to the Chinese Internet giant, Alibaba. But Yahoo still has a 40% stake in Alibaba.” Yahoo CEO and Alibaba co-chair Jerry Yang believes in the companies’ decision to expand in China even if that means, “agreeing to live under its repressive rules."

Despite the censorship laws that plague China, Yang continues to believe in engagements in markets like China. Why? Today, despite limitations on sensitive political subjects, Chinese citizens know more than ever about local public health issues, environmental causes, politics, corruption, consumer choice, job opportunities, and even some foreign affairs.

Congress however contends that with more than 150 million Internet users worldwide, Yahoo’s real focus is on capitalizing in a growing technological market and not on the personal freedoms of China’s people.

In the case of Yahoo against Shi Tao, lawmakers of both parties accused Yahoo

Of putting its profits in a booming China market ahead of human rights by turning over secret data that enabled Chinese officials to track down and punish dissidents.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lanton D-San Mateo said, “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.” Yahoo’s blatant disregard for their clients’ privacy makes them a shrinking giant in the game of corporate monopoly. During his testimony, a Yahoo lawyer told Congress that the company had “no information about the nature of the investigation” at the time the emails were handed over. However the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation revealed that Yahoo China officials had received a “subpoena-like document” on April 22, 2004 from the Beijing State Security Bureau which stated, “your office is in possession of items related to a case of suspected illegal provision of state secrets to foreign entities.” Yahoo’s initial testimony was immediately forgotten. The corporation’s negligence in handling of Shi Tao’s emails and outright corroboration with Chinese authorities that actively seek dissidents speaks to the heartlessness of technologically and financially powerful companies.


Congress is considering passing a legislation that would ban US Internet companies from providing information on its customers to repressive regimes. The imposing Communist regime of China seems like alternate reality to the freedom and democracy celebrated in the US. There are 150 million Internet users, and each one of us is under the watchful and often deceitful eye of the corporate machine, waiting to take every ounce of our freedom away.