Photo By Gail

What happens when something designed to disappear into the endless scroll of the Internet is turned into a large, meticulously painted work of art? That’s one of the questions behind Christine Tien Wang’s History Meme (2022 ) an acrylic painting that manages to be funny, unsettling, and surprisingly thoughtful all at once.

Measuring 86 by 72 inches, History Meme is part of Wang’s ongoing practice of translating Internet memes into paintings. The work was first exhibited in her 2022 show fake stupid, queen of cringe at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin, and was later included in the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles exhibition Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, which is where this photo was taken.

Wang, who was born in Washington, D.C., in 1985 and is now based in San Francisco, is fascinated by the strange ecosystem of images that the Internet produces, recycles, and transforms. She collects memes, many of which are deliberately low-resolution or “poor” images, and painstakingly recreates them in paint. As she’s explained, she can look at perhaps 20 memes in a minute but might make only 20 paintings in an entire year. That mismatch is central to her work, and that’s where History Meme gets particularly interesting.

The title History Meme seems almost like a joke about that transformation. A meme is usually considered the cultural equivalent of a paper plate — use it, laugh at it, throw it away. But what happens when the artist puts one on canvas? Suddenly, an image that may have seemed completely insignificant becomes an artifact of its particular cultural moment.

There is also a darker layer to the work. History Meme has been reproduced in discussions of the online “manosphere,” the sprawling Internet culture surrounding masculinity, misogyny and the politics of young men. That context points toward one of Wang’s larger interests: memes aren’t simply silly pictures. They can become vehicles for cultural anxieties, political ideas, identity and collective behavior.

The artist has said that she appropriates most of the memes she paints, occasionally creating her own. She’s also interested in the relationship between the image and its accompanying text — the combination that allows a meme to communicate so much with so little.  Instead of something that might vanish from our feeds tomorrow, we’re looking at something that could (and does) conceivably hang on a museum wall decades from now.

Photographed in MoCA,  Los Angeles.