Artist : Cao Fei
1.<RMB City> Video Link : https://youtu.be/8-ig_lnO7uU
Video introduction:
In the near future, China Tracy will build a city dubbed RMB City within Second Life. This will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political.
China's current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country's future. In RMB City, we will be able to cruise the digital ocean, witnessing a Ferris wheel rotating on top of the Monument to the People's Heroes; looking down from the sky on the water of the Three Gorges reservoir gushing out of the Tian'anmen rostrum; passing the giant new totem symbolizing the Oriental Pearl TV Tower of Shanghai; hopping over the Feilai Temple marooned in a raging torrent; walking across a vast, desolate state-owned factory area in Northeast China; and finally hovering over the Grand National Theatre in Beijing. Also in our view will be gigantic planes gliding over terraces in the crevices of the central business district, and aerial super-malls. We will see water flowing into huge toilets on the container piers of the Pearl River Delta area before traveling through the sewage system into an ocean with floating statues of Mao Zedong. The rusted steel structure of the Olympic Stadium aka "Bird's Nest" will be washed in splashes of ocean spray, while an aerial band on a floating sheet of the national flag filled with five-pointed stars makes a deafening noise that shakes Rem Koolhaas' CCTV building, causing it to collapse....
Background : It is an art community established by Cao Fei in the three-dimensional virtual world "Second Life" as a public creation platform. Second Life is an online platform where participants create virtual worlds that parallel reality and realize their dreams. The platform has attracted 14 million registered users. Each user acts as an avatar with a digital avatar that can be customized and manipulated. The architectural style of the People's Walled City incorporates iconic elements of China throughout the ages, from giant pandas to the National Stadium built for the 2008 Olympics, reflecting China's urban and cultural explosion in recent years.
2.<whose utopia> Link: https://youtu.be/OB0qJC2sp_0
Filmed in a light bulb factory, the video work is divided into three parts. In the first part, "Product Illusions," workers and machines are producing and assembling light bulbs. The second part is "Fairy Tales of the Factory", in which the protagonists perform in the factory one by one, including a woman dancing in a winged tutu, and a man plucking his guitar, with hardworking workers in the background. The third part, entitled "My Future is Not a Dream", features various figures sitting or standing in the factory, facing the camera. Cao Fei worked as an artist-in-residence in a factory in the Pearl River Delta in southern China, during which she created Whose Utopia. She distributed questionnaires to workers to learn about their backgrounds and aspirations, and worked with some workers to photograph them realizing their dreams in the factory the behavior of. The video captures the poses and expressions of the performers in close-up, showing people's personalities, creativity and dreams, contrasting with the cramped environment and the stereotyped nature of their work. The work interrogates the idea of utopia by juxtaposing personal dreams with the production line, the latter symbol of China's integration with the global economy.
Before filming Whose Utopia?, Cao Fei participated in a six-month artist residency at the OSRAM Factory. She engaged in an immersive research experience, developing an understanding of the space and culture of OSRAM, while collecting research data to inform her creative practice. She collaborated with factory workers on factory installations, performances, as well as developing a factory newspaper called Utopia Daily. In Utopia Daily, the artist writes, “we need to focus on the innermost feelings of every individual in this globalized production chain, this giant and complex system of business... we place them at the center of attention, so as to let them rediscover their personal value, which [is] often neglected during the process of creating huge business value.”
Utopia Daily included a section, which asked factory workers to compare “rational space” to “sensitive space.” The artist defines rational space as “five large workshops, offices, meeting rooms, (and) warehouses.” Sensitive space is defined as a “home for employees, which includes a dining hall, basketball court, dormitory, factory lanes, some of the grasslands, empty ground, stores, (and a) clinic.” While rational space consumes 92.4% of the whole area, sensitive space accounts for only 7.6%. According to Cao Fei’s collected data, she concluded that “sensitive space is preferred.” She adds, “though shorter, sensitive space has more variety.”
Cao Fei used this questionnaire, along with her interactions with factory employees as a form of creative research to inform her process and the resulting video. Notions of rational and sensitive space become a central focus of the narrative of her video work, Whose Utopia?. The video begins with images of the “rational space” of the factory production line, documenting light bulb parts as they methodically move from the grasp of mechanized machines into the hands of factory workers. Workers meticulously separate tiny light bulb components, then assemble, perform quality assurance, and package the light bulbs for shipping and distribution. Working in these “rational spaces,” individuals often sit side by side, yet the space only allows them to remain completely engrossed in their production line tasks, non-social and seemingly unaware of those around them.
The narrative transitions its focus on rational production to what Cao Fei terms, “factory fairytales,” in which individual factory workers transform themselves into the dream they wish to realize. Workers act out their dreams within the rational factory space, becoming a ballerina, a rock and roll star, a dancer, a tai-chi master. The workers perform alone, sometimes in costume, other times in factory uniform. They remain detached from other factory workers working around them who pay no attention to their performances. The “fairytale” sequence ends with a view of a young woman sleeping in her factory bunk, as the camera pans out over the gray vista of Chinese factory buildings below. This portion of the video presents a strikingly beautiful view of the workers’ attempt to incorporate their own dreams and desires, their “sensitive spaces” imagined onto the overwhelming everyday “rational spaces.” Cao Fei has used her research and understanding of the workers and the work-space to create a spatial-emotional narrative.
The final section of the video work presents individual portraits of the factory workers. Each individual stands, motionlessly facing the camera, surrounded by his or her daily “rational” work environment in the background. A melancholic soundtrack plays over each of the portraits, asking “part of your life has waned and waned, but to whom do you beautifully belong?” By the end of the video, the question remains, to whose Chinese dream do these individuals belong?
In a interview with the author, Cao Fei refuses to provide us with a simple answer, as she, herself, asks, “it is a question of whom is the subject of utopia? Is it an individual utopia or a state (urban) utopia? Or is it the invisible, yet attractive mobile global capital?”
Regardless, it is significant that the imagined utopian dreams of these individuals are presented within the very real, rationalized spaces that make up their everyday lived experiences. In this way, space is a crucial component to the work. The workers’ dreams cannot exist without the presence of the lived reality of the factory. This juxtaposition of real and imagined spaces emphasizes the construction of each individual’s desired utopia as a new “sensitive” spatial reality.
As a result of both Cao Fei’s artist residency and her video work Whose Utopia?, workers within the factory emancipate themselves from the monotony of everyday factory life. Empowered as dancers, artists, musicians, and writers, the workers share in optimism and hope about the future. These sentiments are embodied in the film’s concluding shot that depicts a line of male factory workers, each wearing a t-shirt with a Chinese character inscribed on the front. Read collectively, “my future is not a dream.” Through the course of the project and resulting video, Cao Fei transforms the factory into a temporary utopia, whose meaning parallels 20th century Utopian socialist spaces constructed by the PRC.
3. More works: https://youtu.be/Yk4_BsuamLw
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