Beyond Ai Weiwei: How China’s Artists Handle Politics (or Avoid Them) - The New Yorker

 
 

by Christopher Beam  March 27, 2015

 

I met one these younger artists, Cao Fei, an artist from Guangzhou who is in her thirties, one evening during Art Basel. A crowd had gathered on a balcony in the exhibition center to watch her light show, “Same Old, Brand New,” play on the side of the ICC Tower, across the harbor. For Cao, politics aren’t part of day-to-day life in the way that they were for her parents. “Criticizing society, that’s the aesthetics of the last generation,” she said. “When I started making art, I didn’t want to do political things. I was more interested in subcultures, in pop culture.” Ideological art had been done, she said. “It’s all been expressed.”

 

Cao’s work plays with themes of fantasy and escape, from videos about kids who dress up as Japanese manga characters (“Cosplayers”) to a photo and video project in which factory workers enact their dreams (“Whose Utopia”) and a virtual city that she created within Second Life (“RMB City”). The question arises, though: Escape from what? Rather than threats posed by governments, her work is more often concerned with boredom, or with financial and social pressures. Whether these problems arise from political circumstances is for the viewer to decide. “I want to create a space for people to talk about it, rather than directly saying it myself,” she said.

 

The crowd turned to watch the ICC Tower light up with a five-minute animation inspired by nineteen-eighties arcade games. On first viewing, I registered only the familiar symbols: Pac-Man, a mountain of Tetris blocks. But when I rewatched the video online later, the message sank in. In one sequence, an animated fist punches upward at a block, out of which spring symbols of middle-class aspiration—a house, a diamond, a happy couple—only to have the block come crashing down. A sea of skulls dances across the façade, and later the whole building flashes “Game Over.” It reminded me of Unfair Mario, a fan-made version of the Nintendo game that is rigged with infuriating traps. Even if you work hard and play by the rules, Cao’s piece seemed to say, the result is the same.

 

Cao’s critiques, however tame, have at times raised the alarms of censors. When officials objected to a mock Tiananmen Square and a statue of Chairman Mao floating in the sea in “RMB City,” she created a “clean version” for display in mainland China. She’s willing to make changes if the exhibit is important enough, she said, but it depends on the nature of the demands. When a Chinese curator heard that her piece “La Town” would appear at the Venice Biennale this year, the curator suggested that she take it to Shanghai. “I said, ‘Why don’t you see it first, then we’ll talk.’ ”

 

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