Cao Fei

 A Retrospective at MoMA PS1

By Shasta Crawford

RMB City.  China Tracy.  La Town.  These are just three of the works on display by Beijing based artist Cao Fei, which opened this spring at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City.  Organized by PS1’s director, Klaus Biesenbach, and curatorial assistant Jocelyn Miller, the exhibition presents the artist’s first museum monographic overview of Fei’s twenty-year career, summarizing her work to date across a range of mediums including video, photography, sculpture, performance and installation.  The objective of this exhibition is to communicate the swift and chaotic changes occurring in Chinese society, as experienced by the millennial artist herself and her peers.[3]  These changes take the form of digital avatars in Second Life, fantasy fairytale performances in Real Life, and documentary videos displaying this feeling of estrangement, numbness, and overall detachment from the world and tradition.  Although the space at MoMA PS1 offers a variety of exhibition display options, the format for Cao Fei is that of the black box.  All but two rooms are dominated by videos projected onto walls, with a variety of seating arrangements, which seems to underscore the potential that the space has to offer.  At times the exhibition feels like a series of movies as one moves from room to room, akin to adolescent movie-hopping, however it is more than intriguing and a curious viewer would be fine to spend all day attempting to dissect the meaning of the fantasy fueled programs.  This essay seeks to provide a clear understanding of the fantastical world in Cao Fei, and to communicate the ways in which the artist conveys the dystopic nature of contemporary China as it is divided between the real life lived and the limitless nature of the imagination.
 

The exhibition begins, or seems to begin, upon entering the second set of large glass doors atop the domed courtyard.  Here you encounter a white room with three large C-Print stills from the Ms. Cao’s documentary video Whose Utopia? (2006).  Rather confusingly, the viewer is directed down a corridor, where a double-paned black wall text announces the real beginning of the exhibition.  This is where the black box begins.  The first room, dominated by large vitrines displaying miniature figurines, buildings, and scenes in post-apocalyptic world, is immediately disorienting, as the intended direction of the exhibition is painfully unclear. A fork in the road, do you go left, or do you go right?  To the left is a small theater showing one of Ms. Cao’s recent video, La Town (2014).  Is this where I’m supposed to be going?  What is happening?  This seems to be the look on most visitors’ faces as they enter.  To the right of the entrance is a well-lit room with a roundtable of ancient (1990s) television equipment streaming several of Ms. Cao’s early video works [Fig 1].   The juxtaposition of the two possible “beginnings” for the show sets the tone for the rest of the exhibition, as it jumps back and forth within her career, conveying similar themes via similar modes of display.  I chose the light, I chose the right.
 

The “Early Works” room, if this exhibition was intended to be chronological tour of the artists’ work, is the true beginning.  This was the starting point, where it all began – with some friends, hip-hop music, pop culture, and a video recorder.  Cao Fei was born in 1978 in Guangzhou, China, a port city northwest of Hong Kong on the Pearl River and the manufacturing center of China.  Compared to other northern cities, Guangzhou was early in opening to Western investors and developers, inviting a quick and massive influx of previously unknown ideas, customs, and cultures that were to be extremely influential on her artistic career.  Her father, Cao Chong’en, was an accomplished realist sculptor whose statues of leaders form Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping appear throughout China.[4]  During Ms. Cao’s childhood, her father would document his work with a video camera, which he would later pass on to her and her sister, Cao Dan, who is also involved in the arts. 
 

The roundtable in “Early Works” features seven of her early video works in which she reflects upon her circumstances, community, and surroundings by staging multimedia events and performances.[5]  In these mixed documentary and performance videos, Ms. Cao addressees the cultural hybridity of her formative years as a youth in contemporary China.  One video in particular, Hip-Hop: Guangzhou (2003), was especially entertaining [Fig 2].  Here, Ms. Cao documents ordinary citizens such as construction workers, housewives, old and young men and women, security guards, and many more, dancing to contemporary hip-hop music, representing, as Shuqin Cui explains, “a globally fashioned hip-hop culture and musically composed mode of self-expression.”[6]  The themes of the other videos include materialism and consumption, desire, revolution, liberty, and even homage to Chinese filmmaking of the 1930s.  This diverse grouping of themes is a reflection on the artists’ generation as a culturally hybrid, globalized youth culture of contemporary China.  As Fei notes:

Cultural hybridity is deeply rooted in my upbringing and it is reflected in my early theatrical works… In fact, all my work reflects a diverse assortment of cultural layers.  Life itself for my generation is a dynamic and evolving process, and one does not need to organize or sort everything out in an orderly way.[7]
 

Moving past the early works and into the second gallery, the viewer is immersed in a black box theater-like room with five beanbag chairs facing a wall onto which a video is projected.  Two of the remaining walls display C-Print photographic stills from the video, capturing unique and perplexing fantastical scenes.  Cosplayers (2004) is Ms. Cao’s first engagement in documenting the parallel realities of imagination and reality, fantasy and physical [Fig 3,4].  It begins with a series of brief shots where figures, dressed up as Japanese anime or magna characters, are shown standing still juxtaposed with the urban landscape of the modernized city.  They stand looking aimlessly on the roofs of high-rise buildings, in the middle of the river delta, in a field accompanied by oxen, or in a subway car.  They appear to be in a mentally detached state, as if not fully present in the world.  As the video progresses, so do the figures.  They begin to move quickly, dashing in no particular direction until they meet one another and enter into scenes of combat.  As the combat comes to a head, they are shown in public, assaulting innocent pedestrians who scramble for shelter or spree for their lives.  The video then breaks to show the figures as defeated. They are collapsed and seemingly dead.  Their bodies are sprawled on the ground in various locations such as within a meadow, on the shores of the river delta, on the floor of the interior of an abandoned building, or atop an empty flight of stairs.  The video concludes with a return to the figures in mundane settings.  However this time they are at home and accompanied by their families who go about their business as usual, cooking dinner, watching television, reading the newspaper, etc.  The characters, still in costume, have returned to their lives, as we all do at the end of the day, to their homes where fantasy is no longer merged with reality.  They appear depressed, and detached, once again.  
 

Furthering this exploration of role-play and the merging of fantasy and reality, as the viewer moves into the next gallery we find that Ms. Cao has found herself in the alternative reality world of Second Life (SL).  With works such as i.Mirror (2007), Ms. Cao follows the virtual life of her digital avatar, China Tracy, as she discovers alternative realities and new relationships [Fig 5].  A video made in a virtual environment using CGI (machinima), i.Mirror follows the actor, and director, China Tracy, through her experiences in this alternative reality as she develops a close relationship with another avatar, Hug Yue.  The various conversations between these two characters revolve around their feelings about being in Second Life, and their thoughts on the limitations of both virtual and physical realities.  At one point China Tracy asks her companion, “What do you think about the digital world?” to which he replies, “It is one that is dominated by youth, beauty, and money.  And it’s all an illusion.”  For Ms. Cao, the virtual world is a place to momentarily escape Real Life (RL).  In her conversations with other avatars she probes the barrier between the SL and RL, seeking some sort of deeper meaning within the experiences of both.  As Shuqin Cui explains, “filming with the camera in a real place and entering as the avatar in virtual space, the artist begins to dissolve the demarcation between real and virtual worlds.”[8]  On an adjoining wall in this same gallery is an additional video of the digital metropolis, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning, 2007-2011 [Fig 6].  Constructed in Second Life by Ms. Cao, RMB City was conceived as an exaggerated symbol for China’s rapid urbanization and globalization, which mashes up Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and other major international cities to make a city named after the abbreviation for the “renminbi,” China’s currency.[9]  For the artist, this city is meant to be “an experiment exposing the creative relationship between real and virtual spaces,” and also “a reflection of China’s urban and cultural explosion.”[10]  Viewers are encouraged to interact directly in RMB City through the avatar station set up in the gallery.  Through the computer the visitors are able to control China Tracy and navigate this virtual world for themselves [Fig 7].
 

At this point the viewer begins to understand the drift between reality and fantasy.  Moving into the next gallery, we encounter yet another video piece by Ms. Cao, yet this time it takes on more of a documentary style.  Commissioned by Siemens Art Program in 2006, this project documents the lives of the workers at the Osram lighting factory in China’s industrial Perl River Delta region.  In China’s rapidly growing economy, factories such as these also grew quickly, attracting large numbers of workers from inland China.  The video is divided into three parts.  The first, titled “Imagination of Product” follows the parts of various types of light bulbs through their manufacturing stages, from assemblage to quality check and ultimately to secure packaging for shipment.  Part two, “Factory Fairytale,” shows the factory workers performing in the factory during operating hours.  They perform various dances, songs, and deeply felt physical expressions, conveying their deepest desires and talents that are masked by the mundane routinized nature of factory life, and which would otherwise remain stifled and unknown to even their closest peers.  A ballerina dances through a factory full of machines, allowing the young girl to merge both her fantasy and her reality [Fig 8].  A young man plays guitar while machines persist on all sides.  An elderly man silently shadowboxes in the middle of a wide aisle as his fellow workers walk back and forth performing the same monotonous tasks they do every single day.  Part three, “My Future is Not A Dream,” consists of a series of brief motionless scenes of the workers staring stoically into the camera as the daily tasks of the factory unfold around them [Fig 9].  As Simon Grooms describes, “these faces stare at the camera with extraordinary directness, an unflinching gaze that connects them to the external world, issued almost as a challenge to the viewer to defy to see them as the people they are, or assume that their dreams are any less real than the world they inhabit.”[11]  Accompanying the video in this gallery is a small installation of a bunk bed and large stack of cardboard shipping boxes with the label “Utopia Factory” stamped on all facing sides, representing the employees’ dormitory-style housing situations [Fig 10].  These sleeping spaces are the only remaining intimate space for a factory worker.  Decorated with posters and other trinkets that hold special meaning to its occupant, the beds are used as outlets for personal expression.  As with Cosplayers, Whose Utopia is, as the artist stated in an interview with the worldwide renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, about “a parallel between physical reality and internal consciousness.”[12]
 

As the exhibition continues, the viewer is enticed to recline on a large ramp-like bed and watch Haze and Fog (2013), a 46-minute video of sedated zombie-like characters, lifelessly navigating a contemporary Chinese city [Fig 11,12].  Some more “undead” than others, the figures in this video all appear to be suffering from an internal ailment, suggesting that it is not their bodies that have suffered ruin, but instead their souls.[13]  Again, Cao Fei’s work is addressing the issue of migrants affected by the rapid growth in the economy due to globalization and industrialization, and the tension between traditional and contemporary China’s effect on its citizens as an internally disorienting condition.

Following Haze and Fog, the viewer enters the only other well-lit room, which appears to be rather out of place.  On three of the four walls hang pairs of photographs, and in the center of the room are two pedestals, different in height and volume, with iRobot’s navigating the small space allocated atop the pedestal [Fig 13].  There is no wall text to describe the context for this room, however one is able to discern that some images are stills form Haze and Fog, while others are from another unknown project.  The paired images appear identical at first sight, however upon closer inspection one is able to discern slight variations.  The sameness of the scenes in the photos on the walls is complimented by the identical aimlessness of the robots.  Confined to small spaces and without any seemingly unique identity of their own, the robot can be thought of as a metaphor for daily life in contemporary China.  As Shuqin Cui explains, when one enters cyberspace, one becomes temporarily part human/part machine: a cyborg.[15]  Transcending the body through computer technology as a cyborg, as Cao Fei is seen to do throughout this exhibition, raises the question of how fantasy and reality act not only in a virtual world but also in the physical world.[16]  This room and its contents may have been more well received had it been inserted in a different interval.
 

The last part of the exhibition is divided into two parts, with the second being the first room of the show.  Confusing.  I know.  It becomes disorienting as the viewer walks from the adequately lit room of the iRobots into a thoroughly dark black-box theater.  Here one of Cao Fei’s recent works, La Town (2014) is projected onto the far wall [Fig 14].  A video/film about a mythological, post-apocalyptic city in formal and environmental decline, Cao Fei seems to be suggesting that the state of China today is sadly similar.  As Christian Viveros-Fauné stated in a review of the show, “Cao Fei has seen the future of China and it looks like Detroit – after a Hollywood zombie apocalypse.”[16]  The film is made from a series of miniature dioramas, which are on display in several vitrines in the first/last room.  Is this the end?  Was this supposed to be the beginning?  Confusing.  I know.  Either way, Cao Fei offers an excellent insight into the minds and lived experiences of China’s youth citizens as they struggle with raised expectations, falling economic growth rates, and a repressive society that censors the press and the Internet.[17]  Working with digital and technologically advanced tools such as Second Life, video, film, accompanied by performance, Cao Fei’s oeuvre does well to explore the relationship between reality and imagination. 

CITATIONS

[1] Claudia Albertini, Avatars and Antiheroes: A Guide to Contemporary Chinese Artists (Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 2008), 20.

[2] Shuqin Cui, Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), 173

[3] “Cao Fei”, MoMA PS1, (http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/405), Accessed April 20, 2015.

[4] Barbara Pollack, “As China Evolves, the Artist Cao Fei is Watching,” The New York Times, April 1, 2016,             (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/arts/design/as-china-evolves-the-artist-cao-fei-is-watching.html?_r=0), Accessed April 20, 2016.

[5] Wall text, “Early Works”, Cao Fei at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY.

[6] Shuqin Cui, Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China, 172.

[7] Wall text, “Early Works”, Cao Fei at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY.

[8] Shuqin Cui, Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China, 173.

[9] Wall text, “Second Life”, Cao Fei at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY.

[10] Wall text, “Second Lifl”, Cao Fei at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY.

[11] Simon Groom, The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China (Liverpool: Tate, 2007), 51.

[12] Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Cao Fei.” The China Interviews (Hong Kong and Beijing: Office for Discourse Engineering, 2009), 80.

[13] Wall text, “Haze and Fog”, Cao Fei at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY.

[14] Shuqin Cui, Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China, 172.

[15] Shuqin Cui, Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China, 173.

[16] Christian Viveros-Fauné, “Cao Fei’s First Solo US Museum Show Channels a Dystopic Future China,” Artnet News, April 8, 2016, (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cao-fei-show-channels-dystopic-future-china-468662), Accessed April 22, 2016.

[17] Christian Viveros-Fauné, “Cao Fei’s First Solo US Museum Show Channels a Dystopic Future China,” Artnet News.

SOURCES

Albertini, Claudia.  Avatars and Antiheroes: A Guide to Contemporary
Chinese Artists.   Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 2008.

Cui, Qiao, and Yun Chen. Breaking Forecast: 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation   Artists. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, C2010.

Decrop, Jean-Marc and Jérôme Sans. China: The New Generation. Milano: Skira Editore S.p.A., 2014.

Groom, Simon.  The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China. Liverpool: Tate, 2007.

Guan., Zhongguo Mei Shu, and Museum Moderner Kunst. China – Facing Reality. Nürnberg: Verlag Für Moderne Kunst, 2007. Vol. 1.

Hung, Wu. Contemporary Chinese Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014.

Kholeif, Omar. You Are Here: Art After the Internet. Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2014.

Massara, Kathleen. “Cao Fei Tackles the Numbing State of Modernity in Her Solo Show at MoMA PS1.” Artnet News, March 31, 2016, (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cao-fei-solo-show-at-moma-ps1-457568). Accessed April 20, 2016.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. “Cao Fei.” The China Interviews.  Hong Kong and Beijing: Office for Discourse Engineering, 2009. pp74-91.

Peng, Lü. Fragmented Reality: Contemporary Art in 21st-Century China. Milano: Edizioni Charta, 2012.

Pollack, Barbara. “As China Evolves, the Artist Cao Fei is Watching.” The New York Times, April 1, 2016,   (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/arts/design/as-china-evolves-the-   artist-cao-fei-is-watching.html?_r=0). Accessed April 20, 2016.

Shuqin Cui. Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China. Honolulu: Universiti of Hawai’i Press, 2016.

Viveros-Fauné, Christian. “Cao Fei’s First Solo US Museum Show Channels a Dystopic Future China.” Artnet News, April 8, 2016, (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cao-fei-show-channels-dystopic-future-china-468662). Accessed April    22, 2016.

Voci, Paola. China on Video: Smaller-screen Realities. London, New York: Routledge, 2010.

--“Cao Fei.” MoMA PS1. (http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/405). Accessed April 20, 2015.

-- Cao Fei interview with Paddy Johnson (http://artfcity.com/2007/08/03/1005/), Accessed April 22, 2015.