Artist Yang Xiao used video, visual, and sound art to explore the tension between individuals and state power during Shanghai’s lockdown. His work also reflects the silence, confusion, and self-censorship experienced under systemic violence. His video pieces "Goodbye Language" and "News of a Static Zone", once published on WeChat Channels, have since been removed, but they had sparked significant resonance online.
In 2020, Yang Xiao and Chen Sisi co-founded the “Badlands Film Group.” The two created the short documentary "Memoir" centered on the Shanghai lockdown, which became a vital visual archive and record of resistance from that period. The film, built from everyday materials like smartphone footage, TV broadcasts, and online content, captures the absurdity of lockdown controls, state-civilian conflicts, and a doomed popular resistance. It premiered at the Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival on October 7, 2023, and went on to win Best Documentary Short at the 60th Golden Horse Awards on November 25 the same year.
Speaking on their creative intent, “Badlands Film Group” said: “We urgently needed to think about images through images. In Shanghai at the time, a massive wave of grassroots short videos became the most powerful weapon against the bureaucratic machine. We saw it as a movement of ‘short video activism.’”