“Flash has its own advantages that nothing can replace. Some of the effects you couldn’t realise in making films.” —Bu Hua, to china.org.cn

Born: Beijing, 1973. Lives and works in Beijing.

When she was still a child, Bu Hua was invited to design a stamp and a set of postcards. But it was discovering Flash animation software in her late teens that brought her artistic talents to full bloom. “I wanted something dynamic and mobile to express my ideas,” she says. She finds Flash such a satisfying medium of expression that she often spends whole days at the computer. Mini-movies like Cat (2002) and Savage Growth (2008) have won her an enthusiastic following on sites like FlashEmpire.com. More recently, she has begun making vividly coloured giclée prints of her Flash drawings. Many of her works feature her alter ego, a feisty girl in the white blouse and red scarf of a Young Pioneer (the Chinese Communist version of scouts and girl guides), who encounters all kinds of hell—from the monster-ridden darkness of Vowing Not to Attain Buddhahood Until All Are Salvaged From Hell (2008) to the polluted, crowded chaos of modern development in Savage Growth—and skips through it all unscathed. Whether that is because of her innocent purity or her self-absorption is for the viewer to decide.