As China’s fabled economic expansion has begun to stabilize, citizens are left searching for ways to make sense of an environment that has very quickly become alien. Cao Fei’s retrospective at MoMA PS1, her first museum solo show in the United States, charts these chaotic social changes, by visualizing their impact on both geography and flesh. While some works are firmly situated in specific cities, others are accessible only via Second Life, or exist in an undefinable realm within collective cultural memory. But even in the most fantastical of worlds, humans’ ongoing attempts to define their identities and communicate earnestly with each other remains at the forefront, creating an uncomfortably vulnerable yet poignant atmosphere. Many of the films take place in China, and feature the eerily impersonal urbanized landscapes that have become a familiar shorthand for describing contemporary China’s breakneck development and ensuing upheavals. By drawing on imagery that has already become familiar to audiences as symbolic of China, such as dismal factories (as in Whose Utopia?) and exaggerated Chinese kitsch (as in her Second Life-based works), she refers not only to concrete contemporary realities but also to her audience’s imagined ideal of what China is, both affirming and resisting these expectations.
Cao Fei. La Town: White Street. 2014, C-print, 120×80 cm. Courtesy of artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
The exhibit opens with dioramas from Cao’s film La Town (2014). The film’s dialogue is adapted from the 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais, script by Marguerite Duras), wherein the conversation between two lovers– a French woman and a Japanese man– is overlaid on scenes from their tormented romance, as well as traumatic flashbacks and documentary footage of the bombing of Hiroshima. The context of the dialogue guides understanding of the mysterious dioramas, which are featured in the film and juxtapose recognizable cultural markers from various countries, such as Santa Claus, McDonald’s, and Nuremberg’s Little Gooseman fountain. They are the remains of the town after an unidentified catastrophic event, after which time has frozen, the survivors descend into idleness, and zombies roam around unchecked. In Resnais’s film, it seems that the lovers are unable or unwilling to overcome the divergent historical and personal traumas that have shaped them, resulting in a fractured relationship. Likewise, the tiny waxy people in the post-apocalyptic La Town go about their lives in a haze, failing to cultivate fulfilling relationships or meaningful pursuits. The many international cultural symbols exist in close proximity, but like the French and Japanese lovers, they may be discrete entities that cannot connect. The collaging-together of global landmarks exaggerates the notion of forging a national consciousness through familiar symbols, and suggests that the backdrops of Cao’s other, more China-centric films may be more deliberately constructed than they first appear to be as well.
Cao’s film Haze and Fog (2013) vividly portrays the oppressive monotony and emotional flatness of everyday urban life, until it all gives way to a zombie epidemic where the emotionally numbed citizens begin cannibalizing each other. The setting, with its tall but lifeless-looking skyscrapers and nearly-empty public spaces, evokes the contemporary Chinese phenomenon of building huge cities in remote locations and then being unable to fill them with occupants. The city is already a ghost of thwarted urbanization, and this atmosphere of futility suffocates the residents’ daily lives. Local employees wave large hand-shaped signs at nonexistent passersby; a stripper performs for a middle-aged man in a lavish apartment while he ignores her. However, even apocalyptic violence fails to provide catharsis from boredom. Once the zombies start terrorizing, the tone of the film barely shifts, and the citizens of the sleepy city hardly notice the danger. Rapid, forced urbanization is already catastrophic, resulting in an untenable city built on shaky foundations; a supernatural disaster seems like an inevitable next phase rather than an unexpected break. The citizens’ gradual transformation into zombies changes little, as they are already void of thought and awareness. The film presents a familiar Chinese stereotype of shiny soulless cities occupied by aimless citizens, then exaggerates it to the point of absurdity.
Cao Fei. Cosplayers Series: A Ming at Home. 2004. C-print, 75×100 cm. Courtesy of artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
In contrast, COSplayers (2004), though it features a similar backdrop of large, impersonal skyscrapers, offers an alternative way of inhabiting an unsympathetic world. The youths in the film dress up as characters from anime and manga, in order to reenact the medium’s fantastical battle scenes and poses. They seem to hope that by inhabiting these characters, they can bring some meaning to the vast but soulless Guangzhou cityscape and free themselves from their daily routines. The cityscape at first appears completely alienating, but as it becomes the backdrop for the cosplayers’ reenactments, its starkness starts to seem like an advantage, resembling the surreal and futuristic settings commonly found in anime. Still, the points where their fantasy comes into friction with physical reality– such as when their weapons flop futilely in the midst of battle, or their costumes get soaked from running through swampy water– delineate the boundaries of their escapism. These moments highlight the melancholy and constant yearning from which even cosplay cannot entirely free them. Cao blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality by allowing the two worlds to pollute each other, and subtly undermines the simple opposition she initially appears to present.
Cao Fei (SL avatar: China Tracy). Mirror. 2007. Machinima, 28’, Courtesy of artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
In China Tracy: i.Mirror (2007), Cao examines the construction of national, personal, and geographic identities in digital space. By now, it has become clear that the internet is not, as was once widely and optimistically believed, a wonderland where anonymity grants all users equality. However, Second Life seems to epitomize that era of optimism, as it grants users the ability to inhabit numerous different selves with no requirement that those selves represent realistic physical forms. But rather than completely departing from her IRL self, Cao creates a deliberately exaggerated collage of fortune cookie Chinese-ness and inhabits that instead. Her avatar, China Tracy, often wears a qipao with a twin-bun hairstyle, and her romantic interest, Hug Yue, literally addresses her as “China.” As a female Chinese artist whose work is frequently framed in relation to these two traits, how does Cao Fei inhabit this identity? In i.Mirror, Cao appears to reckon with both the gaps and the overlaps between her external appearance and her interior landscape. While the jerky movements and excessive sentimentality of Second Life’s avatars and backdrops make it difficult to see their interactions as earnest rather than parodic, we are led to believe that the feelings of attachment between China Tracy and Hug Yue are, if not explicitly romantic, at least very sincere. At the end, in i.Mirror (Part 3), the trancelike flow of the first two parts gives way to a cathartic release. Inspiring music washes over a montage of various avatars caught in mid-motion or gazing up into the sky, and there’s a feeling of hopefulness that is not nullified by the concurrent garishness and sentimentality. Though Cao creates a mirage of exaggerated, artificial Chinese womanhood, she still emotionally invests herself in this shell, and the viewer’s experience of the film reflects this coexistence between naiveté, sincerity, and fantasy bordering on stereotype (imposed by others and by oneself).
Cao Fei (SL avatar: China Tracy). RMB City: A Second Life City Planning. 2007. Digital print, 120 x 160 cm. Courtesy of artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
China Tracy: i.Mirror demonstrates Cao’s exploration of fantasy, numbness, and national identity, which recur in her more recent films; but as her notoriety has expanded internationally, her focus has also widened to encompass nations and cultures that are explicitly international. While some of her works use familiar or simplistic imagery as a foundation, the exhibit’s circular structure guides viewers back to La Town at its conclusion, where her deliberate compilation of recognizable symbols reveals awareness of constructing a nation as imagined ideal. Perhaps as Cao’s reach continues to grow, viewers will increasingly see their own cultural symbols reflected in her work and be encouraged towards self-reflection rather than the hope of a conspiratorial glimpse into an exotic ideal of China. Through her appropriation of stereotypes, she complicates her given role as a transparent lens into authentic contemporary Chineseness, resisting the satisfying simplifications that Western audiences often seek to impose, and urging viewers to consider the universality of the themes she explores.
