When it comes to art on social media, the medium needs to be integrated into the work

If you saw any of the hundreds of manipulated cartoons, film posters and photographs of chief executive hopeful Henry Tang Ying-yen being shared online during last year's election, you were part of a brave new world of art that is challenging social norms, political control and the definition of art itself. Or so say proponents of social media art - art that uses sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Tumblr as its medium of creation and dissemination.

During last year's election, Tang, who illegally added an underground expansion to his luxury home, was made fun of in numerous cartoons and satirical works, including one online poster where Tang's face grins from a Harry Potter movie spoof below the caption "Kowloon Basement and the Chamber of Secrets".

Amusing, but is it art? Yes, say artists and art critics, for two reasons.

First, as Hong Kong gallery owner and critic John Batten says: "Andy Warhol demonstrated that anything could be art - the use of the internet is just an extension of that idea."

Second, when it comes to social media art, according to one definition hashed out during an artists' roundtable discussion on the Facebook page of New York City-based blogazine Hyperallergic, the artwork in question is not one satirically altered movie poster, but the collective activity of multiple, at times anonymous, artists. Often they are just members of the public not practising or trained in art, all working on the same meme - in this case, Henry Tang's illegal basement. One can hardly dispute that it is a wonderfully witty and creative outpouring.

At the heart of the issue is the slight but important distinction between art on social media, and social media art. An artist painting a picture, photographing it and putting it up on Facebook, or making a video, uploading it to YouTube, and tweeting the link is not social media art. The medium needs to be integrated into the work.

Take the meme of the Pepper Spray Cop that spread through the internet last year. A row of seated protesters at the University of California were showered with pepper spray by a policeman, Lieutenant John Pike. The image of Pike, spray can in hand, was posted on social news website Reddit. The next day, two Photoshopped images appeared online, one with another meme, the image of actor Leonardo DiCaprio walking jauntily, known as Strutting Leo, Photoshopped over Pike.

The second image saw Pike superimposed into the 1819 painting Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull.

As news of the pepper spray incident circulated on television, in newspapers and on online news sites, the meme spread. Soon, hundreds of Photoshopped images were shared, including Pike superimposed into Picasso's famous anti-war painting Guernica and on to an image of the United States Constitution.