The Instagram Project is a constellation of works looking at Instagram images that knowingly or unknowingly participate in the construction and consumption of the Chinese as a spectacle of “the other.” This is a gaze that is often mistaken as the societal reality. Through an analytical and satirical approach and methodology, Jiang takes the images and the words accompanying them out of Instagram and she dissects, alters, and repurposes them to create new meanings within a new dispensation. Quirky Science Questions and Provocative Jokes Deconstructed are two works from a broader project that undoes the underlying ethnocentric value judgments that fuel the popularity of these images on social media.

Quirky Science Questions is a set of unexpected science problems created from images and video clips from Instagram. The reading of the pictures shifts as they are given a new function, liberating them from the original narrow-minded context. The questions are produced in collaboration with Theodora Ntoka, an education researcher. On the other hand, Provocative Jokes Deconstructed focuses on nine of the numerous Instagram “jokes” that are made at the expense of the objectification of real people. The photographs are deconstructed and further broken down into three parts: people, words, and captions. The flicking through jokes, readily to be laughed at, are turned into separate entities demanding viewer attention and thinking. They are called upon to make up their own minds about what is at stake within this world of secret pleasures.