Exhibitions
Any World's an Abyss
Harold Grieves
Born in Guangzhou in 1978, Cao Fei exemplifies an emerging generation of young Chinese people who have embraced pop culture as a global lingua franca. Worldly, pragmatic, and materialistic, they reflect China's unprecedented recent urbanisation. Cao Fei's work speaks of their spontaneous engagement with new, unexpected opportunities. It is couched in an array of contradictory practices through which, as she puts it, 'utopia needs to be constructed by us working together', making her appearance under a utopian rhetoric somewhat double-edged.1
It's hard to appreciate the impulses and tensions that exist for China's new generation without understanding their country's turbulent urbanisation, which was spurred by Deng Xiaoping's late-1970s economic reforms. These reforms saw the creation of the special economic zones of the Pearl River Delta region (PRD) bordering Macau and Hong Kong, where the influx of transnational companies transformed cities, such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou, into magnets for migration and sites of unprecedented economic growth. While it's tempting to see these cities as economic and ideological test-beds for China's transition to capitalism, their rapid growth was an 'evolving phase of China's command economy', being dependent on the centralised communist bureaucracy.2 Hence, the new generation is not only marked by conflicts between traditional values and the furtive promise of an anticipated future, but also by an outright 'fear of plunging into the brutal nightmare of a society based on a combination of totalitarian politics and materialist values'.3 Cao Fei, however, remains optimistic about this moment, in which new and traditional modes of life are hybridised.4
This optimism is typified by her video Cosplayers (2004), which follows a group of idealistic youths—dressed as manga-style fantasy figures, in historical and futuristic science-fiction costumes—as they skulk through Guangzhou, fighting mock battles. Beginning on the city's outskirts, their games provide an alternative lens through which to view the city and the everyday life that blithely continues around them. Their Peter-Pan escapism exemplifies their generation's struggle with everyday life.5 Underscoring this, the video's closing sequence sees Cao Fei's protagonists return home despondent, forlorn, and indifferent to their family members. In promoting cosplay as tactical, Cao Fei celebrates a generation disenfranchised by real life who cocoon themselves in fantasies, but, in doing so, generate an agency through which they can adapt or resituate their capabilities to the city. Cao Fei celebrates cosplay for how it ambivalently engages with contemporary Chinese society. She does not cast cosplayers as disenfranchised outsiders; rather she sees cosplay as a form of collective reverie—its momentary empowerment projecting a common goal, a better future.
This theme is continued in her video Whose Utopia (2006), which was made during her residency at the Osram light-bulb factory in the PRD industrial city of Foshan. The video documents the way that China is enabling its 'integration within the global system' through 'products created by a young labour force from the inland provinces'.6 The first chapter, 'Imagination of Product', details the sublime, balletic machinations of the factory's automated systems and its Sisyphean human labourers' secondary involvement. The second chapter, 'Factory Fairytale', interleaves the factory setting with a series of interpretative imaginings, capturing workers in moments of speculation—dressed as angels, playing guitar, and dancing—creating a surreal alter-factory in which the drudgery of work is offset by a collective reverie.
The third and last chapter, 'My Future Is Not a Dream', more sombre in intent, presents individual workers standing still at their work stations as machines continue about them. It culminates with a group shot of the workers each wearing a portion of the phrase 'My Future Is Not a Dream'. It's an emblematic moment balanced between reverie and realism. Combining a Mao slogan and a Taiwanese pop song,7 this phrase deftly captures the new generation's ambivalence. Tinged with mild regret, it suggests a defiant, open, pragmatic negotiation of the future. This resonates through the factory workers, whose collective production seems to dwarf their individual contributions.
Cao Fei's subsequent work, based around and within the Internet social-networking site Second Life, has increased her popularity. It allows simultaneous access to the 'dark continents of China and the Internet',8 caricaturing both China and the Internet as 'final frontiers' for Western capitalism, but also making plain their potential to retain a resolute independence. Her Second Life platform, RMB City, echoes China's rapid disordered urbanisation, but also reflects subcultural agitation.
Traditionally, we had the ideal of the flâneur—the stroller who traversed the city, driven by their curiosities and desires, making their own sense of it. But today, the flâneur logic has been co-opted by the 'instrumental urbanity' of retail and transformed into compliant window-shopping. Although the design of malls is driven by commercial interests, it often seeks to conceal this by recalling an old idea of democratic public space.10 However, the idea of the city as an even superficially welcoming space is refuted by RMB City's architectural frenzy. There is simply no way to idealise it as a homely space. Its amalgamation of diverse forms of iconic architecture is characterised by irreverent inversions and hybrids—for example, Tiananmen Square as a swimming pool. Closing with a parody of Disney's trademark fireworks sequence, Cao Fei's promo-clip RMB City (2007) may seem to idealise attenuated over-nourished urbanism, yet we could not be further from the way Disney promoted new urbanism through a neo-con co-option of nostalgic main-street appeal.
Second Life's partial investments and navigational strategies offer a key to RMB City, whose jumbled landscape of tendentious architecture reflects the Internet's own chaotic networks of social exchange. The Internet's 'paradoxical culture of extreme narcissism coupled with an intense desire for external connection'11 generates social exchange as disordered as RMB City's chaotic collaging of architectural styles. This was highlighted in Cao Fei's first Second Life work, i.Mirror (2006), which documents the wanderings and interactions of her Second Life avatar, China Tracy. Cao Fei's nomadic spirit exemplifies what Michel de Certeau calls 'tactical poaching': occupying others' territories and recombining the rules and products that exist there to create spaces for oneself.12 Conscious that her occupation of this contradictory realm is tentative, Tracy has characterised Second Life as a 'meet and miss' world that fosters a 'more transient and observant attitude towards groups'.13 In i.Mirror, her conclusion—that 'every world is an abyss'—structures a Real-Life/Second-Life corollary: being enveloped within Second Life mirrors our complicity but also our agency within contemporary consumer society.
Disorder provides building blocks for self-organisation, says Hou Hanru.14 Where nothing is planned, where everything is contingent, we have to construct things for ourselves. RMB City foregrounds the provisional networks that cause 'informal, DIY actions' to flourish.15 Cao Fei's idea of utopia enables her to construct 'a new kind of fairytale-like world', which still maintains 'a certain relationship with China's reality'.16 But it's her insistence on pragmatic and collective forms of reverie that allows her work to move through utopian poses in spite of a millennial culture jaded by last century's totalitarian and hegemonic deployments of grand recits (master narratives).
1. Cao Fei cited in Hu Fang, 'Once Again, We're on the Road', in Cao Fei: Journey, ed. Hu Fang (Paris: Frac Il-de France, Le Plateau; Guangzhou: Vitamin Creative Space, 2008), 119.
2. Jeffery Inaba, 'Maybe', in Content, ed. Rem Koolhaas (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 256–7.
3. Hou Hanru, 'Cao Fei: A Mini-Manifesto of New New Human Beings', Flash Art 242 (May–June 2005), 126–7.
4. Commenting on Cosplayers, Cao Fei has suggested: 'my generation grew up in a situation of hybridity. Many outsiders think that me and my peers were isolated, but hybrid influences have always been there. We were already hybrids. We cannot exactly differentiate that from what was the original and what was the traditional because, as in Cosplayers, there's nothing that we can exactly belong to.' Jordan Strom, 'Your Utopia Is Ours: An Interview with Cao Fei', Fillip 4 (Fall 2006), http://fillip.ca/content/your-utopia-is-ours.
5. Cao Fei cited in Karen Smith, The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China (Liverpool: Tate, 2007), 46.
6. Ibid., 48.
7. In the late 1980s, 'My Future Is Not a Dream' was a hit song on mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan for Taiwanese pop singer Tom Chang (Chang Yu-sheng). At the same time as it was inspiring young people to pursue their ambitions, the gifted singer was killed in a car accident.
8. Brian Droitcour, 'Virtual Realty: RMB City, Second Life', in 'Scene and Herd' (16 January 2009), http://www.artforum.com.
9. John McMorrough's phrase to describe entertainment retail's rise as the leading propulsion of urban renewal. McMorrough argues that shopping pre-empts the very idea of the city, ushering in an ulterior logic that consolidates retail as a pre-emptive and highly conservative public realm. 'City of Shopping', in The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, ed. Rem Koolhaas, Judy Chuihua Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, and Sze Tsung (New York: Taschen, 2002), 193–203.
10. In 1994, a New Jersey Supreme Court officially recognised the shopping mall as a public domain. Considering a case involving a political leaflet drop, the court established a precedent in which the mall, having 'replaced the parks and squares that were traditionally the home of free speech', was now deemed to carry within it an expectation of, and tolerance towards, its constitution as a viable public space. See Sze Tsung Leong, '. . . And Then There Was Shopping', in The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, 152.
11. Johana Fateman and Rachel Greene, 'People with Similar Turn-ons', in Whitney 2004 Biennial Catalogue, ed. Chrissie Iles, Shamin Momin, and Debra Singer (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2004), 86–9.
12. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 32.
13. 'What's Next?: Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Cao Fei', Cao Fei: Journey, 68.
14. Hou Hanru, 'Bejing Now', in Content, 457.
15. Ibid.
16. Cao Fei cited in 'What's Next?', 69–70.
China Tracy's New New Second Life
Justin Clemens
Entering the rigorous red brick of RMB City Hall (aka Sigg Castle), you're confronted with a collage of disparate architectures. A spinning model of the city itself—with its gigantic flying panda, propaganda statues, cranes, a disassembled Chinese flag, spinning wheels, tower blocks, and other paraphernalia—floats before you, its mysteries decoded by the keys provided nearby on what look to be giant, rotating, polystyrene cups. You read: 'Sampling City', 'E-colony City', 'Superficial City', 'Mobile City', 'E-topistic City', 'Post-sedentary City', and so on. One rotating cup maps images to sites and names; another gives faces and names to the RMB R&D team; another explains the RMB urbanisation concept; and others present relevant planning and investing details, as well as quotes from Italo Calvino's extraordinary novel Invisible Cities. Exhortatory posters on the walls, in corporate-style Chinglish, read: 'Don't Do Anything I Wouldn't Do'; 'In All Endeavors, Search for the Quantum Leap!'; 'Do Not Commit but Intelligent Mistakes!' The image of UliSigg Cisse—the First Mayor of the City—which accompanies these injunctions seems to represent an idealised version of the real-life Swiss collector and big-time investor in contemporary Chinese art, Uli Sigg. A flying yellow hardhat begs you: 'Touch me for PRESS KIT'. Elsewhere, you are informed of 'NEW PROJECTS: Master Q's Feng Shui Intervention in RMB City by Huang He'.
Outside, it's mayhem. Sure, you might have foreseen this when you viewed the model in City Hall and, sure, you could do a quick tour of the grounds on a flying Soaring Dawn Swan, but the actual experience of the mammothly disjunctive conurbation is pretty disturbing. Everywhere you look are skyscrapers, scaffolding, freeways, and a factory site that purports to be a locale for the Yokohama Triennial where you can buy 'Dream Umbrellas' for L$1. You see a wrecked gunship, a tank with a huge concrete column emerging from its turret, a nightmarket selling clothes and food, and a gargantuan yellow toilet bowl into which giant fish unendingly fling their bodies. There's an entirely monochrome 2-D intervention by NO LAB as well as billboards proclaiming 'A Fleeting Absolute We Are' and 'In the Pixels We Trust', among many other bizarre sights. Some you might recognise as doubles of sites in the real world—as Shanghai or Beijing landmarks, perhaps. You can even take a ride into the virtual firmament on a People's Rocket.
Welcome to RMB City, Cao Fei's dream baby, a massive construction enterprise in Second Life (SL), the notorious real-time virtual environment in which you can buy and build and trade in pretty much anything that you can imagine. There have been many comparable 3-D, immersive, networked online worlds—including the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs)—but what gives SL its winning edge is what the artist Adam Nash calls its 'Californian Libertarian Capitalist' principles. SL is founded on property and creative rights (for example, you can buy land, as well as design and sell various goods, from balloons to body-parts), plus a genuine economy trading in 'Linden Dollars', which can be exchanged for, ahem, real money in the, ahem, real world as well.
Indeed, the 'RMB' of RMB City is an acronym for Ren Min Bi—'The People's Currency'—the official currency of China, which, as it happens, doesn't enjoy 'full convertibility'. That is, regarding capital accounts (domestic-foreign exchange), the currency's movements are tightly constrained by the Chinese government. RMB City is an allegory of all this flux and control. It makes giddy utopian promises, but it also knows which side its bread is buttered on. As more than one commentator has noted, RMB City is literally a turbo-charged online Chinatown inserted into the existing architectural landscape of SL. RMB City's First Life (FL) outpost is a hydra-headed art-dealer-cum-property-investment-broker corporation that integrates private and public galleries worldwide, as well as maintaining a variety of online sites: come, see, enjoy, buy!
RMB is also a compression of the English 'ReMemBer,' a kind of anticipated leap into a space where real cities have become secondary to virtual ones. Traditionally, mnemotechnics—the science or art of memory-enhancement—involved the construction of an orderly architecture in the mind, imaginary interior palaces into which objects could be deposited and then retrieved at will. But contemporary global mnemotechnics has affected this program in at least two ways. Firstly, it has radically externalised memory into data-banks and other high-tech hardware. Secondly, it is not organised by a single principle, but, to use Lebbeus Woods's neologism, is more like an anarchitecture1—a wild agglomeration of disparate constructions, unleashed from any simple functionality. The RMB City Hall is not, after all, a seat of real organisation, efficiency, or power, but a real-mock-PR-centre for investors, art-lovers, and random tourists to RMB City. Not so much memorial as immemorial, these new metastatic meta-cities are not ordered but disorderly conglomerations of desire.
Before beginning the design, construction, and investment for RMB City—that is, before turning herself into a new kind of online-aesthetic-property-entrepreneur, and thereby inventing a new kind of figure for the artist—Cao Fei had already been an itinerant on SL for several years, wandering about, encountering others, and filming her experiences. Her film i.Mirror (2006)—which documents a strange, quasi-romantic encounter between her avatar China Tracy and Hug Yue, whose FL representative is a sexagenarian Californian communist bankrobber—has an entirely novel character due to the peculiarities of virtual communication. The artist was simultaneously herself, an actor in, a subject of, and the editor for the film that was at once entirely animated and yet entirely documentary. The film mimics a kind of schmaltzy generic chick-flick, in which boy meets girl in various romantic fantasy situations—alone together in an urban train-carriage, in a hot air balloon, and in bars where they exchange meaningful non-sequiturs by text or play pianos or guitars—with Hollywood-style cross-cutting and an MOR soundtrack that's guaranteed to jerk the tears.
Moreover, the technologies for making the film—technically, a Machinima—were entirely in-world; a cameraless recording of pixel-events. In SL, to have an 'experience' at all, is to know in advance that the experience is a priori and in principle absolutely recoverable; the experience that 'you're' 'having' can be replayed down to the very last pixel for somebody else. One of the features that makes SL and the new-media metaverse so unique is that anyone can make recordings in SL as they go. To put this more plainly, any possible 'experience' on SL is always-already recordable, replayable, surveyable, and able to be reconstituted and represented in any number of forms—whether as still-life digital prints or video—then whacked up onto YouTube or Flickr, for the delectation of anybody. When Hug Yue asserts the relation between FL and SL, 'We do not act. We simply be what we are', China Tracy replies, 'Everybody is an actor in parallel world'.
The 'avatar'—a name that originally designated the incarnation of a god—is the primary interface between the user and the world of SL. A fully-customisable figure, an avatar can be altered by the user at their discretion or, at least, in accordance with their wallet, taste, dedication, and talent. In addition to the basic off-the-rack anybodies available, the sorts of avatars you might find in SL include a giant moose with a shotgun, a muscular Tom-of-Finland angel, a Chinese Lion Head complete with streamers, a polychrome alien dressed up like a Leigh Bowery character, a humanoid-animal creature referred to by fans as a 'Furry', as well as a swarm of Barbie-and-Ken-type bodies dressed in neo-medieval fantasy gear. How an avatar is customised can have functional effects in-world; for example, Cao Fei bought 'real skin' (to be better-looking and appear a more serious SL-izen) as well as 'a pussy' for her avatar (so she could have sex in the various hard-core zones in SL). Each avatar has its own SL name, unlikely to be the same as that of its FL user. Cao Fei's avatar's name is, famously, 'China Tracy,' which sounds like a generic Western-style noir name. However, as Cao Fei points out, she thinks of 'China'—in accordance with Chinese tradition—as the family name, and 'Tracy' as what Europeans would call the first name.
This directs us to the crucial issues that SL brings up: obligated pseudonyms (you have to have an avatar name); possible heteronyms (a term coined by the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa,2 the disciple of one of his own heteronyms, it is a name for an absolute other for which you're the support); ultimate anonyms (the name designates no real individual at all, but anonymous processes); and finally, to invoke a concept of Giorgio Manganelli, even homopseudonyms. According to Giorgio Agamben, a homopseudonym 'consists of using a pseudonym that is in every respect identical to one's own name.'3 The real name of Cao Fei, in other words, is really 'Cao Fei', a creature absolutely different, if absolutely indiscernible, from Cao Fei herself. These nominal dislocations are both intra-lingual and inter-lingual, implicating all sorts of technologies, cultures, and media. They assault the largest, clumsiest oppositions, such as 'East' and 'West', 'Self' and 'Other', as well as directing us towards the incredibly complicated, specific local situations in which each of us finds ourself dislocated today.
The new virtual environments are most often considered by media theorists as, on the one hand, operating between the demands of command-control-communication—that is, networked computing as a particularly insidious and nasty biopolitical phenomenon—and, on the other hand, the giddy celebration of identity-flux; the constitutive power of new technologies to unleash you from your body and enable you to present yourself as pretty much anything whatsoever (the other sex, older, younger, a dog, an alien, a young prince from Australia, etc.). In these environments, the control is not so much administered by centralised surveillance, discipline, and punishment agencies, as by enjoying one's own playing with identity to the extent that one's 'life' becomes so much more intense online than off. In this regard, total control and total jouissance are short-circuited by SL. It presents a new form of an old paradox always intertwined with art: a person's most intense reality is, in fact, their own private fantasy, an attempt to evade reality. Public reality itself is composed of innumerable self-concealing fantasies of this kind. These private fantasies are themselves composed from elements first drawn from public reality itself. Much of Cao Fei's work drills down into the dazzling sludge of virtual reality, in order to show just how much is constituted by decayed utopian fantasies. Reality is constituted by the attempts to escape it.
Two major, antithetical tendencies in contemporary global art that deal centrally with this paradox are what we could call kenosis and ekphrasis.4 The former term denotes an emptying-out, a self-negation of art that aims at an absolute minimum of presentation, towards almost-nothing. The latter goes in the opposite direction, towards trans-mediatic appropriations, towards representing how representations represent. Traditionally, with the trope of ekphrasis, one art form seizes another, such as a poem about a painting or a sculpture about a story. These days, however, ekphrasis is radicalised. Cao Fei's practice is a full-blown version of ekphrasis, one that emerges at the point where 'reality' itself has, in a banal yet absolute way, become entirely dominated by multimedia, by print and radio and TV and mobile phones and networked globalised computing. She resolutely deploys some of our globalised planet's key communication technologies—video, Second Life, Machinima—each of which can, in a 'post-convergent' media-kinda-way, document, merge with, or appropriate each other as content.
In some of her work, Cao Fei's analyses 'socialist realism' and 'official sculpture', showing how the political capture of art takes on familial, social, and personal consequences. One example is Father (2005), a video that documents Fei's father Cao Chong'en, an official artist working in the socialist realist style, fulfilling a commission to make a massive bronze sculpture of the young Deng Xiaoping. The political and aesthetic compactions here are mindboggling; a vertiginous presentation of interlinked-but-not-quite-identical divergences: a video about a sculpture, a daughter's story about a father, a young artist's work on an older artist, a piece of contemporary art about old-school art, moving images about immobile images. In a way, these complex relationships are already concentrated in the figure of Deng himself; a long-term supporter of Mao, Deng was purged in the Cultural Revolution, before returning to supreme power after Mao's death. Interestingly, Cao Chong'en's commission was for a statue of the young Deng, i.e., as a gigantic bronze of the man before he did anything that would make him important enough to have a statue made about him. Furthermore, despite Deng's political hostility to the USSR, the very form of 'art'—socialist realism—which was used to memorialise him was first given its decisive impetus by the USSR itself.
Arrayed against official art, we find unofficial subcultural formations in Cao Fei's work. In her video Cosplayers (2004), she documents Chinese adolescents—dressed in the shiny, neo-retro, sci-fi, imperialist style beloved by anime characters—engaging in strange protracted battles through the cityscape of Guangzhou. Perhaps real wars from Japanese and Chinese history return in these teenage fantasy reenactments; theatricalising generational, cultural, and political anxieties in these new exploding localities. But even gods and demons have to eat their cornflakes in their family apartments to keep up their strength. Here, the image of the hero is removed from its narratives, producing scenarios at once ridiculous and actual, enigmatic and distressing.
On the basis of such works, Cao Fei's art practice is regularly called 'political', but this is too quick and simple a denomination. Cao Fei is engaged in something more complicated and interesting. On the one hand, she shows how contemporary art cannot not be political, insofar as it must touch on the ways in which historical utopian energies continue to pulse through the dystopic present as residues of realised images of happiness gone wrong in their very incarnation in the world. As we have seen, her work consistently presents politics as essentially a struggle of utopias, documenting how politics forces out images and objects and structures and events, which lose their very justification in and through this forcing.
On the other hand, Cao Fei simultaneously shows how art must fail to be political, and in at least two senses. Firstly, art just doesn't have the power to impose itself like this—and when it tries to seize this power, it loses itself as art, becoming just another practice of exploitation and false hope. Secondly, art's power derives from its peculiar form of powerlessness, its ability to stage and rehearse the operations of politics without instrumentalising itself disastrously with human lives. In fact, art documents art's tendency to be captured by politics as if such documentation were itself one way that contemporary art can keep going in the mediatised trans-political uproar.
So Cao Fei's ekphrases emerge at the most extreme points of novelty of our glocal present: the wildest developmental investment in China, the wildest technological innovations like Second Life, the wildest personal experiments with identity. As Hou Hanru points out, in China, Cao Fei's generation is known as Xin Xin Ren Lei—'New New Human Beings'. In this vein, we might conceive of Cao Fei's work as a practice of New New Contemporary Art.
1. See Lebbeus Woods, Anarchitecture: Architecture is a Political Act (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).
2. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 130.
3. See Darlene J. Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).
4. See James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004).