Your Utopia is Ours - Fillip
by Jordan Strom Fall 2006
Speaking recently of the wooden sculptural
city she made for the China Month Project at Robert Wilson’s Water Mill Centre
in New York, Cao Fei described the work, “like Shanghai or Manhattan,” in that
it looked “very beautiful but empty inside.” Resembling the skyline of
Guangzhou or the big box factories of the Pearl River Delta where she has
situated most of her projects, Cao is transfixed by the spaces of urban
capitalism and its effects on the lives of workers, youths, lovers,
entertainers, and street hawkers that occupy them. Playing the seam of
documentary and artifice with a good deal of agility, the artist is one of a
younger generation of artists who is busy fusing digital technologies with
traditional theatrical forms and contemporary cultural phenomena.
Unlike her father—a successful seventy-four
year old State sculptor—Cao opts for a multiplicity of roles: filmmaker,
playwright, photographer, composer, sculptor, and video artist. After she gave
up the flared costumes and heavy makeup of projects such as COSplayers (2004)
and PRD Anti-Heroes (2005) there was a transition in her work toward the
shop-floor realism of her 2006 Sydney Biennale project What are you doing here
While still concerned with youth, Cao Fei’s work has recently taken another
turn—this time toward nature, escape, and the environmental impact of tourism.
Recently in Vancouver for exhibitions at
Artspeak and Presentation House in conjunction with Territories —a large group
show which scattered itself across several of the city’s municipalities—the
artist sat down late one summer night to discuss some of the recent shifts in
her work.
Jordan Strom: If there is one element that
seems to run through the majority of your projects, it’s dance. From the
choreographed revolutionary dancing of PRD Anti-heroes troupe and the gangly
proto-electro movement of Hip Hop (2003) to the onastic waltzing of the milk
delivery boy in Milkman (2005), what is it about dance that is important for
you to repeatedly include it in your work?
Cao Fei: Dance is part of my personal
history. I used to do a lot of street dancing when I was an early teen. Not hip
hop per se. I performed what is called street dance. I would tell my parents
that I was going to night school, but instead I would take the money to go to
dance on the street. We would go as a group. Some streets were more quiet than
others. We would bring our ghetto blaster and dance all afternoon and night.
Later it shifted to the clubs, but early on it was the street that was
important.
Strom: You clearly took this experience of
dancing and the theatre of the street for inspiration in your projects such as
Hip Hop where you capture different individuals (workers, students, police,
grandparents) dancing their own interpretation of a hip hop style. The echoes
of American youth culture can be found in your other works too. Where did your
knowledge of this youth culture derive from?
Cao: I saw lots of MTV when I young. I
learned a great deal through TV, especially Hong Kong television that was
broadcast in Guangzhou. It was a mix of Hong Kong and Western programming.
Strom: The curator and interview-raconteur
Hans Ulrich Obrist has spoken recently about the manner in which you use pop
culture. He says that you don’t use it in the common way that artists often
deploy it as—a “ubiquitous orgy of appropriation or revival.” Instead, you use
pop culture as a bridge between different ideas. Could you talk about this
bridging—and the notion of hybridity—that the viewer finds in your work.
Cao: 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.
Strom: Heroicism is certainly present in
your work, but it is dealt with and expressed in a very different manner than
with previous generations. I think of your father’s grand figurative sculptures
of Deng Xiaoping in your documentary of him titled Father (2005). Whereas your
heroic figures—the at once dissolute and steely-nerved teens of COSplayers or
the transgressing milk delivery man, A Ming, in Milkman—are embodied in the
urban youth of Guangzhou itself.
Cao: For my father’s generation, everybody
had a hero. At one point everybody worshipped Deng or Mao. They shared these
heroes as a group. The current generation has its own personal private heroes.
For many it is manga, and the characters of manga who are the new heroes. Many
of the younger generation identify to such a degree with these characters that
they feel they have these heroic powers in themselves. For both generations the
image of each hero—as conveyed through their poses—contain a great deal of
meaning. Part of that power is symbolized through a set of poses that each
character has. That’s why for me the pose plays such a central role in work
such as COSplayers. The nation’s history always credits the good hero, like Lei
Feng. I am more interested in the folk. I am interested in common people.
Different jobs. History never remembers them. This led me to working with the
factory workers in the project for the Sydney Biennale.
Strom: And this Siemens Art Project: What
are you doing here for Sydney seems like a logical extension of your PRD
Anti-Heroes project in many ways. Rather than working with actors playing the
part of workers of the Pearl River Delta, you’re working instead with the actual
PRD factory workers from the OSRAM factory to create an art performance piece.
This is not dissimilar from COSplayers where you used actual teenagers that had
previously participated in these same sorts of activities. Yet, in What are you
doing here it isn’t the city that is the stage, instead it is the factory
floor. Why did you decide to make this jump to the spaces and people of the
factory?
Cao: It is an interesting thing. I have
always been drawn to the theatricality of daily life. In PRD Anti-Heroes I
change the story. I let the actor act like workers on the stage, and this time,
the recent project, I got rid of the real actor and used the real worker. The
theatre in effect went directly to the real. It was my first time collaborating
directly with the worker, and not with other performing or fine artists. It was
an extraordinary experience. I feel that I learned a great deal from them that
I would not have been able to do through books, reports, or newspaper articles
on their conditions and experiences.
Strom: Could you describe the process that
went into the theatrical productions that you eventually staged?
Cao: I began by composing fifteen questions
and sending them to the factory workers to respond to. Not everybody from this
group responded due to the sheer volume of questions and their busy work
schedules. In the end about a hundred replied. I then averaged the responses.
Some questions concerned their daily life. “How do you feel about the factory”
or “Why did you decide to leave your home and go to the river delta” and “What
do you hope to achieve in the future” This process gave me an interesting impression
of their lives in the factory. In the end I selected fifty-five employees
dictated by the nature of their responses. These employees were then divided
into smaller groups and asked to build installations and orchestrate
performances. In one instance, for example, a worker who demonstrates an
interest in sound and music is encouraged to develop ways to use his product
which he interacts with everyday to make noise music. These “products” are key
to the project. On the production line, the product is their job; it is their
everything.
Yet, at the same time they don’t think of
it as a product. Through these workshops we make installations with each group.
We also integrate performance and dance in the factory, which is generally
banned from the factory space and the production line. I wanted to push the
boundaries of normality within the spaces of the factory.
Strom: You have previously discussed how
these activities are very much about releasing emotions and feeling of the
factory worker. Could you talk about this?
Cao: Yes, it is about them having a chance
to expose their ideas and feelings to their fellow workers and make that
expression visible. The conditions that these workers live under is generally
highly invisible to a broader public. What this project does is release the
workers from a standardized notion of productivity. What we are doing is
production, but a type of production that connects back to the personal. I am
like a social worker. They don’t regard me as an artist. They think I’m an event
organizer, a social worker. This is fine with me as it was always my intention
to have the artist’s role disappear. What I noticed is that through these
activities the workers become interested in things. Now they have a
relationship to art. Their products are connected to art.
Strom: The newspaper, the Utopia Daily,
which you produced in conjunction with the project, seems to refer or allude to
a kind of early socialist worker papers—a factory workers’ news of sorts. Yet,
the Utopia Daily talks not so much about collective utopia as individual ones,
or how the individual imagines or experiences utopia. Can you expand on this
notion of individual utopia?
Cao: The fundamental question is “Whose
utopia” The slogan of the newspaper is “Your utopia is ours.” Cho-gan means “is
ours.” What I mean by this is that it is everybody’s utopia. It’s the society’s
utopia as a whole. It’s the government’s utopia. Generally, the government
focussed strictly on economic production and GDP.
The majority of the workers immigrate to
the big city, to the factory, and in doing so have no rights, no benefits, and
no power. So what I am attempting to ask through this work is “Where is their
dream” “What is utopia” As part of this I hope to make people inside and
outside the factory conscious of this problem.
Strom: As you say you want the project to
impact outside of this particular factory. Yet, you have described to me how
the work is manifested strictly within that space. How does the work extend
into the world How were these actions that took place in the factory realized
in the 15th Sydney Biennale exhibition?
Cao: Yes, so the first phase of the
exhibition is inside the factory. This aspect of the work is meant for the
factory workers and their families only. The performances and installations
took place in the factory’s basketball court. The second phase takes place in
the Sydney Biennale. Here we installed video monitors which played the
performances within the context of the exhibition. In addition there were
stacks of the Utopia Daily newspaper for people to take away.
Strom: So you think the direct interaction
and social interaction involved in the Siemens Project has more impact than the
poetic theatricality of COSplayers for example?
Cao: I think it does.
Strom: Do you think then that this is a big
shift in your practice and that you might not return to this earlier mode that
is more reliant on artifice?
Cao: After doing the What are you doing here project I feel that it is really important
that art have this social aspect, this function of trying to reach out to
society, not just to be making something beautiful in your studio but to
actually function as a bridge.
Strom: I would like you to discuss your
most recent project. What is the premise behind the Yuannan Film Project?
Cao: Yuannan is a region in west China. It
has not had a lot of industrial development around it. It has no capital
interjected into it, so it is still very untouched and pristine. So many people
travel there, whether they are foreigners or locals. Some people, like the
Japanese or Americans, set up residences and stay there and kind of become a
part of the local scene. So while it has become a major tourist province it is
even more than this. It is a kind of a utopia within China. A place to search
for paradise and reject the kind of rapid reorganization happening in society
at large. With this project I wanted to make a feature-length documentary of
sorts—a travelogue—using two young people—who happen to be rappers—both in real
life and in the film. I am interested in a youth backpacking subculture that
has formed in this region over the last number of years. Backpacking seems to
be used by youth in order for them to prove their vigor and self-worth. I was
interested in the way these two young men as rappers are already natural
performers. Throughout the course of the film they spontaneously perform, rap,
and banter back and forth with each other. For me this activity is about their
seeking escape and fantasy.
Strom: But as with any drama, not
everything is fine in paradise. How do these two young men fare in utopia?
Cao: Yes, as it turns out it is not a very
fruitful trip. Much like the Three Gorges Dam, the local officials in that part
of Yuannan want to develop a dam as a means to achieve widespread economic
development. So that would mean that much of this area would get flooded about
200 meters and they have started to move—and of course this would have a
devastating environmental impact. Equally devastating would be the social
impact. Officials have already begun moving a lot of the ethnic minorities out
of the region. This represents a significant loss of cultures because the
specific qualities of their customs will be lost. I want the film to appear to
the government like entertainment or promotion.
I have to be indirect in making these
points because the project is sponsored by the Yuannan government. We need to
get permission from the Film Department in central Beijing. The censors will
look over it. You can’t be direct. Anyway, I am not looking to create
opposition. If I take a very extreme or oppositional position, then it’s not
fruitful. It doesn’t really reach the audience. It’s better to try to provide
some sort of mediation, some sort of bridging. What is important is this
exchange. In this sense it is not just a personal artist thing. It is my role
to communicate with the different social strata of society.
Special thanks to Steven Tong and Sally Lee
for their help with the translation of this interview.