Avatars, cosplay ... and a once cherished Chinese restaurant
Chinese artist Cao Fei’s mind-bending exhibition at AGNSW has reclaimed the furniture from a once beloved Sydney institution.
Review of: Cao Fei: My City is Yours, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until April 14.
Some years ago – in 2009 in fact – a work by Chinese video and computer artist Cao Fei was one of the highlights of the Anne Landa Video Award at the Art Gallery of NSW (reviewed here on June 6-7, 2009). As I observed at the time, it stood out from other things in the exhibition not only by virtue of its content but also its form. Unlike the other works shown, Cao’s black-and-white video film had a tripartite structure and a clear temporal sequence that made the viewer want to watch it from beginning to end.
Significantly, Whose Utopia? (2006) was a commissioned work. People today, and art students in particular, often think of artists in the past as having been constrained by the demands and stipulations of commissions from church or state and imagine the contemporary artist as enjoying unfettered freedom to spread the wings of their creativity.
The truth is almost exactly the reverse: constraints and demands fuel creative energy, as we can see in the careers of countless artists, architects, authors or composers; while there is nothing more paralysing to an artist than to be asked nothing more than to “make art” in a vacuum of meaning and relevance.
The circumstances of the commission were significant too. It came from the great German industrial company Siemens and specified a documentary focus on the firm’s Osram light bulb factory in Guangdong province in China. The film’s taut and economical structure clearly owes something to the fact it had to be a complete, self-contained and structured work. In hindsight, the artist’s oeuvre would have benefited from more commissions of this kind.
But it was also significant that the film was set in a factory in China, for this touches on one of the most important and even troubling aspects of the economic globalisation that has overtaken the world in the past half century.
With the opening of international trade and consequently an internationally competitive labour market, more highly paid workers in Europe and across the West lost millions of jobs to lower-paid workers in China. This effectively destroyed much of the manufacturing industry of the West and devastated working-class communities, which now found themselves unemployed.
Not all of these workers were able to be retrained and find work in the new information or service industries. But the impact of unemployment was to some extent offset by the flood of cheap products now made in China – from clothes and plastic toys at the lowest level to electronics and sophisticated technology, particularly the devices we all take for granted today, such as mobile phones and computers.
These devices, which are so readily available at a relatively low price and make many aspects of our daily lives easier and more convenient than ever, are as cheap as they are only because they are produced in Chinese factories whose workers endure conditions that would be unthinkable in the West. In 2010, international controversy arose for a time after it was revealed that several workers at the giant Foxconn factory complex, which produced many of the computers used everyday in the rich world, had attempted suicide.
Although conditions in these factory complexes are oppressive and reduce workers to anonymous operatives whose sole function is to keep the production process moving seamlessly, they are apparently fed motivational readings, of which a sample was quoted in a CBS News report: “Hurry toward your finest dreams, pursue a magnificent life. At Foxconn, you can expand your knowledge and accumulate experience. Your dreams extend from here until tomorrow.”
These are exactly the issues that underlie Cao’s short film and help to explain its title. We may live in a “utopia” of boundless information, entertainment and convenience (although now we increasingly are coming to recognise the alarming damage this has done to the mental health of young people in only a decade or so) but this utopia – or dystopia – is made possible by the working conditions of Chinese employees whose experience is very different. That there is nothing overtly unpleasant about the Osram factory – it is clean, relatively comfortable, the workers are focused but not visibly under pressure – makes the sense of human alienation in the industrial process, presented as it were in pure form, all the more poignant.
But Cao’s film is above all about the kind of dreams to which the Foxconn manual alludes. Or perhaps not quite the same dreams for the Foxconn manual implies that workers starting at the bottom may one day become managers, bosses, even wealthy entrepreneurs in their own right. Cao’s film, in contrast, reveals quite different aspirations: her workers dream of alternative lives outside the industrial world to which they are confined, lives that are, if anything, even more unlikely ever to be realised. After a first section that effectively situates the human workers within the larger industrial process – from the early stages done robotically to the finer work requiring human intervention to the final packaging and dispatching – the second, titled Factory Fairytale, has individuals, chosen from among real workers in the factory, enacting their alternative lives among the machines on which they work all day long: a girl dreams of being a ballerina and dances on pointe shoes in a tutu and swan costume; an older man performs hip-hop movements in the corridors between rows of machines, while a younger one plays electric guitar.
Unfortunately, most of the other work in the present survey exhibition lacks anything like this sense of focus and structure, and the exhibition itself is so confusing in its design and layout that you end up walking around the whole thing several times just to make sure you really have seen all its various components. It certainly does not make for a very pleasant visitor experience, as they would say today, and there were only a handful of other visitors while I was in the exhibition.
One of the earliest of these sets of material is footage from the artist’s exploration of the once groundbreaking Second Life platform, which allows users to adopt personas known as avatars and to interact with other players in real time. Some of this material was subsequently edited into a quasi-film, but the result could hardly be more shapeless and pointless. At the same time, stills from this material, especially of the artist’s avatar, China Tracy, are liberally displayed around the space, giving the impression that the curators are trying to make rather slight content go a long way.
There is also a room with imagery from an imaginary city conceived in Second Life, called RMB City. The visuals are confusing – even if intentionally chaotic – and again rather gratuitous, as though trying to persuade us that countless hours spent playing in cyberspace had really amounted to the creation of an artistic work.
Somewhat more interesting is a set of films taken of mini-dioramas, of which the original models are also on display. These were presumably filmed with the low-tech process of stop-motion animation and display unusual things happening in banal environments: a couple having sex on a terrace, or a man standing on a rooftop with a gun to the head of a female hostage.
The problem with this kind of work, yet again, is that it has no shape, no apparent beginning or end, so there is no incentive to stay for more than a minute or two at most; it’s only going to be more of the same, at once random and inconclusive.
A documentary work on cosplay among urban teenagers detains our attention somewhat longer and deals with the same kind of dissociation and alienation that was evoked in the earlier Siemens commission. We are shown working-class teenagers who live in identical tiny apartments in identical tower blocks on the fringes of cities and who escape from the desperate dreariness of their existences by dressing up in elaborate costumes as characters from manga comics and then filming each other out in the fields or on rooftops.
The whole scenario is infused with a deep pathos, but it is even more acute in the scenes that show these children at home with their families in their cramped living quarters: getting dressed to go out into their imaginary world of play-acting; or home afterwards, still wearing part of their costume, sitting in the kitchen eating supper. Once again the role of dreams in human life is evoked and we are reminded how consistently the concept is abused both in the political sphere and in the world of marketing.
If the word dreams, in these contexts, refers to aspirations to attainment or to ideas of who we are or could be in the future, then it may be useful to the extent that dreams are realisable and give people the energy and confidence to seek to achieve their hopes. But if they are unrealisable and impossible, they may simply be devices for manipulating vulnerable people with illusory fancies and false hopes. If they are essentially escapist and have no possible connection to reality – such as the manga cosplay – they can be harmless entertainment up to a point but also can tip over into mental derangement if the reality principle is forgotten.
Cao’s most recent work ventures still further into an oneiric world, only now it is more nightmare than dream. Here Comes the Metaverse introduces us to a new avatar of the artist, this time produced with far more sophisticated technology than Second Life but also far more sinister that the fairly harmless China Tracy. The new avatar is called Oz and is an expressionless bald creature that floats vacantly in a vacuum as though lobotomised. Most disturbingly, octopus tentacles seem to pierce or break through her body like something out of a horror movie. She is described in an admittedly incoherent wall label as “part cephalopod, part humanoid”, but the overall impression is of a humanoid being taken over by an alien life form, as in a B-grade horror movie. You are left wondering why you would willingly spend any longer than necessary in this neurotic fantasy.
As for the rest of the exhibition, there is an installation of furniture from the once-famous but now closed Marigold Restaurant in Chinatown, a kind of bathtub in which visitors can wallow surrounded by blocks of foam – don’t ask why – and, as you leave, Chinatown Shuffle, a video of random individuals dancing to hip-hop music in Chinatown. If all this seems gratuitous and disconnected, it is. You leave the exhibition with a sense of relief, but also with the dazed feeling of someone who has spent too long on the web, lost in the bottomless, endlessly cross-linked mire of delusion.
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