The “Unerasable Characters” series examines posts deleted from social media and poetically reconstructs them, serving as a lyrical repository for suppressed voices. Three works have been created based on posts deleted from Weibo, one of China’s largest social media platforms, collected through the data collection and visualization project Weiboscope, developed at the University of Hong Kong.

In “Unerasable Characters I,” a vast number of posts deleted over the course of a year starting from June 2021 are printed on paper, along with text generated through machine learning based on those posts. In “Unerasable Characters II,” text is projected onto the wall in a grid format, with each square assigned a different post, displayed for the same duration as the time from when it was posted until it was deleted. “Unerasable Characters III” features deleted posts from December 2019 to February 2020, displayed in a blurred manner, with only symbols and emojis remaining clear.

This series emphasizes expressing the scale of suppressed voices and their silence by representing the number of deleted posts, the duration they were accessible, and the length of the text through the quantity of paper used, projection time, and the blurred letters, rather than analyzing and extracting the essence of the content of the deleted posts. It also aims to provoke discussion and reflection on deletion and censorship.