Bu Hua’s art originated among a Chinese subculture of online digital artists, and more specifically of young people who create animated works using often pirated Adobe Flash software, then upload these works to websites where they can be shared and viewed by a community of peers. Certainly this kind of thing happens everywhere, but in China, Internet communities have some unique properties, and we are not just talking about the Great Firewall.

In Bu Hua’s digital art, we encounter two defining elements. First, there is the cartoonish figure of a school girl in the uniform of blue skirt and white blouse, with a red ribbon around her neck and sometimes smoking a cigarette. This is Bu Hua’s alter ego, a bad-girl princess who lives in and explores a virtual world. Second, there is the virtual world itself. This is a carefully constructed fantasy world that pits an architecture of magical abundance against a population of bizarre, and often troubled beings. It is a world that constantly shifts between polar opposites: on one hand, there is a paradise of luxury goods and Chinese palace architecture, and on the other there is a black-skied, dystopian realm inspired by industrial China. Bu Hua describes this world, saying, “Basically it 's what you might call the different phases of my own psychic world. The scenes are wild, nostalgic and surreal. They express feelings and states of mind from real life.”