Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises’
By Chris Berry, King’s College London
Abstract
This essay examines the moving image works of Chinese artist Cao Fei as a response to China’s rapid urbanisation and the transformation of its existing urban spaces, as they are no longer shaped by socialism but instead by what this essay considers as China’s engagement with neoliberalism, including and facilitated by globalisation. The urban sprawl of the Pearl River Delta inspired star architect Rem Koolhaas’s writings on the ‘generic city’, which he celebrates precisely for its blandness. Cao Fei herself is from Guangzhou. Yet, in works like RMB City, Haze and Fog,Whose Utopia and Hip Hop Guangzhou, Cao Fei creates what she calls ‘magical metropolises’.This essay asks what kind of responses Cao’s ‘magical’ works are to contemporary Chinese urbanisation. As part of the answer to that question, it applies fourhermeneutic frameworks to analyse the works themselves. The findings from each of those frameworks indicate that Cao’s work does not only reflect the current Chinese urban condition, but also participates and intervenes in it in various ways.First, the essay argues that these metropolises can be understood as heterotopic imaginations of urban China. These do not simply reflect the contemporary Chinese city but through their transformed depiction encourage viewers to crystallize its woes and at the same time hope for its future. Second, unlike her earlier work, Cao Fei’s more recent works such as those considered here are instances of participatory art. By enlisting the subjects of the artwork as collaborators, they have the opportunity to rehearse alternative urban possibilities. Third, and in response to Cao’s own claim that her cities are ‘magical’, they focuses on Cao’s use of dance and rhythm to re-enchant these disenchanted, or perhaps, pace Koolhaas, generic, spaces in her artworks, both for the participants in the works and for audiences, at least for the duration of their engagement with the works. Finally, it argues that these qualities combine to make Cao’s work part of the contemporary trend towards a new gestural cinema inspired by the practice of filmmaking for the gallery, and one in which gesture is understood as itself an ethical as well as aesthetic practice, in so far as it calls upon collaborators and audiences to imagine a transformed Chinese city
Keywords
China, gallery films, magic, urbanisation, re-enchantment, heterotopia, Cao Fei, the gestural
Introduction
As China has urbanised, so Chinese visual artists of all kinds have responded to this phenomenon in different ways.[1] By now, the fact of China’s ultra-rapid urbanisation is well known world-wide. Thomas Campanella wrote in 2008 that, ‘There were fewer than 200 cities in China in the late 1970s; today, there are nearly 700. . . . Forty-six Chinese cities passed the one-million mark since 1992, making for a national total of 102 cities with more than a million residents. In the United States, we have all of nine such cities’.[2]There is no sign that this process will slow down soon. Indeed, a plan announced in 2014 foresees 100 million farmers moving into the cities by 2020.[3]Although Campanella’s focus is on architecture, he cannot avoid noting the huge upheaval this urban development has entailed for China’s citizens, going on to point out that ‘In Shanghai (上海) alone, redevelopment projects in the 1990s displaced more people than thirty years of urban renewal in the United States’.[4] Qin Shao even calls the frequent process of compulsory demolition against the will of the householder as part of urban development ‘domicide’ in her book on the phenomenon.[5]
The social, economic, material, and especially emotional and psychological impact of urbanisation on almost every Chinese person’s life has made it an almost inevitable feature of cultural production, including in the visual arts. Almost as soon as the dust settled on Tiananmen (天安门)after 1989 and marketization was intensified in the early 1990s, a new wave of independent feature and documentary filmmaking shifted away from the epic history and exotic borderlands favoured by many so-called ‘Fifth Generation’ films to focus heavily on rapidly changing contemporary city life.[6]As Alice Schmatzberger has shown, Chinese photographers have been equally responsive to urban change in recent years.[7] The same is true of numerous artists. In a previous issue of this journaland again in this issue of China Information, Maurizio Marinelli has examined the work one of China’s first contemporary artists, Zhang Dali (张大力), famous for his graffiti silhouettes of human heads on walls all over Beijing, especially those marked for demolition, as a form of engagement with urban change.[8]
In my own previous writing, I have examined the early work of the artist who this essay is focused on, Cao Fei (曹斐), as another artist’s response to urbanisation. Born in Guangzhou (广州) in 1978 and educated at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts,[9]Cao joined the U-thèque independent art collective, which was active in Shenzhen and Guangzhou in the early 2000s.[10] Among the various outputs generated by U-thèque’s projects was a documentary called San Yuan Lico-directed by Cao and Ou Ning (欧宁). As announced in the opening credits, the film was produced for the 2003 Venice Biennale as part of a multi-faceted installation, which alsoincluded a website and a book.[11] It is a montage-based work in the manner of city symphony films such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Symphonie der Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, 1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Человек с киноаппаратом(Man with a Movie Camera, 1929).[12] As discussed in the book and the film, Sanyuanli (三元里) was the village reputed to have resisted the British during the Opium War, but at the time the film was made it had become both an example of the ‘village in the city’ phenomenon whereby China’s expanding cities have enveloped surrounding villages[13] and an often-cited inner-city crime neighbourhood in Guangzhou. In my earlier essay on the film, I contrasted U-thèque’s insistence on the local specificity of Sanyuanli and its struggles with Rem Koolhaas’s celebration of the Pearl River Delta’s urban sprawl as the ‘generic city’ freed from the pretensions of modernism. I argued that these different interpretations might be the result of differences in perspective – the view from business class or the back of the limo as opposed to the on-the-ground and in-the-alleyways experience rendered by U-thèque’s documentary.[14]
Although San Yuan Li does get into the alleyways, the montage format forecloses upon the possibility of interviews or other interactions with the local residents making it into the film. In her own comments on the experience of making the film, Cao Fei noted: ‘. . . the thought dawns on us that the subjects before us are beyond our control. Innumerable pedestrians and tricycles simply keep darting about, whipping up trails of dust and smoke in their wake. It is too easy to pan them in and out of the viewfinder. People look back at the camera lens with mistrust in their eyes. We keep a critical distance behind our monitor screen . . .’[15]Perhaps the sense of dissatisfaction this statement communicates about keeping a distance lies behind some changes in Cao Fei’s more recent practice, especially in the works she has made since the disbanding of U-thèque. It is the characteristics of this more recent work that this essay examines further.
In particular, I focus on four of Cao Fei’s many moving image works: 嘻哈：广州(Hip Hop Guangzhou, video, 3 minutes 27 seconds, 2003);谁的乌托邦(Whose Utopia, video, 20 minutes, 2006);人民城寨(RMB City, 2007 onwards); and 霾(Haze and Fog, video, 46 minutes 30 seconds, 2013). Further details about the works are given in the following section of the essay. I argue that, taken together, her works are part of an effort to not simply depict but also intervene, transform, and even – insofar as it is possible for art to do it – redeem the new city. My effort is focused on understanding the works themselves, including the documentation of their production. Not only with Cao Fei but with most contemporary artists, this documentation appears increasingly frequently in the gallery space and online, and arguably has become part of the artwork itself. To some extent, this documentation includes testament from participants about the effect on them of their engagement with Cao’s works. The larger cultural impact of her work and that of other contemporary Chinese artists showing on the burgeoning contemporary art scene in China as well as around the world is beyond boundaries of this project, as is the particular context of its production and circulation inside China, and this would require a separate audience research project in its own right.[16] But before such a project could be attempted, it is necessary to have some further understanding of the works themselves, and this essay attempts to begin that understanding.
Because Cao’s works aim to have an effect on their audiences and those who participate in making them, certainly during the process of their engagement with the works, her art constitutes an ethical as well as aesthetic practice. To understand how this effort at both ethical and aesthetic practice is manifested in the characteristics of the artworks themselves, this essay applies four hermeneutic frameworks. First, Cao Fei’s works often function not simply as documents that hold up a mirror to the city and its transformations, but also as heterotopias that challenge our everyday and taken for granted understandingsof the city. In this way they demand that their audiences think about new possibilities. Although all four of the works are discussed in each section, this section focusesin particular on her Second Life online project, RMB City, to explore this heterotopic dimension of her response to the Chinese city. Second, many of Cao’s works are also instances of participatory art. Above, it was suggested that Cao Fei was dissatisfied with the lack of communication with the people filmed inSan Yuan Li. Since then, her work has gone beyond only observing the inhabitants of the city to involving them in the artistic process, making it part of their lives. Here, Hip Hop Guangzhouand Whose Utopiawill be the key examples. Third, Cao Fei has been quoted as saying her recent work Haze and Fog is about ‘magical metropolises’.[17]This ‘magical’ quality is something her work brings to the city as it appears in her work, a quality that can be understood as an attempt at re-enchantment and redemption. However, in Cao Fei’s case this carries no religious implications. Instead, it is the use of music, rhythm and dance in her work that makes it ‘magical’. In this section, all the works are discussed, but the focus is on Haze and Fog in particular.Finally, the essay employs contemporary reengagement with theories of gesture to argue thatthis dance-generated magic is part of a gestural practice of cinema for the gallery, in which the gestural can be understood as Cao Fei’s ethical and aesthetic effort to help the citizens of the Chinese city find the magic in their metropolises through their participation in and witnessing of art.
Cao Fei’s Heterotopic Mirrors
In his writing on space, Michel Foucault tries to draw a line between utopias and heterotopias. Utopias are ‘fundamentally unreal’ spaces that ‘represent society itself brought to perfection, or its reverse’.. In contrast, heterotopias do exist in the real world, but they are apart from it. They are places where the spatial arrangements of the rest of society are ‘represented, challenged, and overturned’, in this way reflecting back upon the ordinary world much as a kaleidoscope provides a differently ordered vision of the world. But almost immediately after attempting this distinction, he proposes ‘a sort of mixed experience which partakes of the qualities of both locations’, which he terms ‘the mirror’. Furthermore, within a paragraph, he is leaning away from the idea of the mirror as an in-between space and emphasizing its function as a heterotopia because of the way what appears in the mirror is not only determined by the real space outside it but also has an effect on that space by reflecting back on it.[18]
Perhaps one could argue that the entire world of art production stands in a mirror heterotopic relation to everyday life; it is in the real world, refers to world outside itself, andaspires to contribute tothe transformationof that world. Certainly, all of Cao’s works under consideration here function in this way. None of them are completely abstract and imagined spaces with no relationship to contemporary reality. Indeed, as will be discussed in further detail in the next section of this paper, one of the special qualities of much of her work is that it is made in cooperation with the people whose world it depicts, and they enter into the world of the artwork and participate in it. Nor are the depictions absolutely perfect or absolutely imperfect in the manner of the utopia or dystopia. Nor are theydirect mirror-like representations of the world out there in the documentary or realist manner. Rather their aesthetic depictions “represent, challenge and overturn” in various ways, as Foucault puts it. Therefore, perhaps the idea of the heterotopic mirror best characterizes the relationship of Cao’s work to representation.
For example, the title of Hip Hop Guangzhou makes it clear that this three-and-a-half minute music video-style piece refers to a specific Chinese city. But rather than showing the kind of young people who might plausibly be captured doing hip-hop moves in a realist or documentary mode, Cao’s video has grandpas, security guards, construction workers, and other less likely people dancing. The fact that they are all people without evident work or whose work is not well-paid and involves working outdoors and exposed to the elements suggests a contrast between the fun they seem to be having in the video and the more gruelling nature of their labour (see figure 1). Although the works I am focusing on in this essay all reflect specifically on the Chinese city, Cao is an internationally known artist, and so other pieces extend beyond China to cities overseas. For example, the popularity of Hip Hop Guangzhou, led to follow-up commissions that took her to Japan (Hip Hop Fukuoka, video, 8 minutes, 2005) and the United States (Hip Hop New York, video, 5 minutes, 2006).
Figure 1. Hip Hop Guangzhou[19]
According to Christine Hildebrandt, Principal of the Siemens Art Foundation, Whose Utopia was a project resulting from another commission by Osram China Lighting and the Siemens Art Project. Cao Fei was invited to work with the staff of Osram at their Foshan (佛山) plant.[20]Just as Hip Hop Guangzhou does not reflect Guangzhou street scenes directly, so too Whose Utopiais a project where Osram’s regular practices are ‘challenged and overturned’, at least temporarily. Cao Fei’s question guiding the entire project is ‘What Are You Doing Here?’ This question is, she explains, directed at the ‘common workers’ to ‘place them at the centre of attention, so as to let them rediscover their personal value,’ which is ‘often neglected during the process ofcreating huge business value.’[21]
Heterotopic mirroring occurs both in the video and in the larger art project of Whose Utopia, which the video was part of and which I will examine in more detail in the next section. In the case of the video, the first half is a montage piece of the machines at work. There are no humans present, and the entire sequence is edited rhythmically, so that the light bulbs whirl and slide about the assembly lines, turning on and off in a balletic routine reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley movie. In the second half, we are in the factory with the workers, but there are dancers amongst them. A middle-aged man in overalls does a sort of moonwalk, and a ballet dancer in a tutu does a Swan Lake routine. As in Hip Hop Guangzhou, the out-of-place figures are thought-provoking. Do the dying swan ballet moves question what happens to young women who spend their youth working on an assembly line? Does the moonwalk suggest that older workers have been doing the same thing so long they are almost sleepwalking? (See figure 2.) And does the ballet of the light bulbs in a world without people suggest the entire factory is an inhuman place? These are some of the thoughts that occur to me watching the video. But, of course, a different viewer might understand these elements in different ways. What makes them heterotopic in nature and function is not the particular interpretation placed upon them but how they reflect the space that they refer to back differently, surprising any viewer and demanding interpretation.
Figure 2. Moonwalking in Whose Utopia
Like San Yuan Li, bothHip Hop Guangzhou and Whose Utopia are also about real places in the Pearl River Delta conurbation, the area that inspired Rem Koolhaas’s concept of the generic city. Just as San Yuan Lican be understood as countering the idea of the generic city because it inscribes the specific local qualities and history of a Guangzhou neighbourhood, these works also emphasize local specificity. The characters hip hop dancing on the streets of Guangzhou are different from those Cao Fei videos dancing on the streets of Fukuoka and New York. The Osram factory’s products and workers are specific and have their own qualities, too, making this factory distinct from others that it might superficially resemble.