Cao Fei’s ‘Blueprints’ begins in a room decorated to look like a mid-20th century foyer in China: the kind you can still only find in the increasingly few hotels and restaurants in this fast-changing country that have yet to feel the pressures of upscale modernisation. A receptionist greets you from behind a dark wooden standing desk, behind which hangs a poster with gold characters set against red velvet. Antiquated wooden chairs are dotted around the room and various Maoist memorabilia – a mini calendar from 1958 featuring Mao and Khrushchev celebrating the Sino-Soviet union; electronics manuals from the sixties – are arranged in glass cases. The room, the introductory brochure explains, is Cao’s tribute to Beijing’s Hongxia theatre, a former cinema designed for local factory workers that currently serves as her studio space, itself set to be demolished and replaced by a set of skyscrapers. The only incongruous element in the room is an installation that looks like a modern-day ATM machine in the bottom-left corner, on the screen of which a documentary video about the lives of Hongxia’s former factory workers plays on a loop. Men and women describe their lives in the ‘50s and ‘60s during the height of friendly relations between China and the Soviet Union (which disintegrated by the latter end of the ‘60s) and the rigid orderliness of their days: one woman remembers a “collective breastfeeding hour” at the factory, while a man reflects on the sweeping ambition of the Soviet-style design ascendant at the time, which saw architects design factories and homes on criteria as particular as the ideal ratio of hairdressers to residents. He is sceptical: “men are not gods”.
Cao was born in 1978 in Guangzhou, a southern city home to many of the first post-Mao liberal economic reforms that opened up China’s economy to the world. Since then, the dominant narrative of China has been one of aggressive, triumphant growth: after markets opened to globalisation, the people got jobs and got rich, and now the country is shooting into the future. Cao’s work not only looks at the costs of such progress but questions its basic premise. If Cao’s recreation of the old Hongxia theatre grounds the viewer in a specific time and place – helped along by historical testimony from workers who lived through it – the rest of ‘Blueprints’ lifts you into a vortex, featuring futuristic films that explore themes often associated with the artist: the alienation of modern city life; the dehumanising effects of automation, and the teetering possibility of civilisational collapse. Walk into the room ahead and there’s Nova (2019), a hallucinatory time-travelling love story that takes place in the electronics factory that once adjoined the original theatre. The future is here and dead in La Town (2014), in which an unseen French couple in 2046 look back on the blood-stained remnants of a civilisation, much like our own, dotted with run-down McDonalds and gas stations; Asia One (2018) is set in an Amazon-like mail sorting factory in an indeterminate future, where a woman, man, and robot while away their identical days.
Cao’s films have often been read as a critical commentary on the costs of modernisation within China, yet globalisation has meant that what is born in one country is never a single country’s problem. Whose Utopia (2006), a three-part film Cao made during a six-month residency at a south China light bulb factory, begins with montages of an assembly line at work: glass bulbs clinking on conveyor belts; rows of men and women painstakingly bending electronic wires together. The bulbs assembled in this factory will go far beyond the borders of the country. They might arrive in homes across America or be sold at higher prices in shops across Europe, and their tungsten metal filaments may well have been mined in Rwanda. The alienation Cao explores is not a phenomenon limited to China – she speaks to the particularities of her time and her region while tapping into a global mood of nervous energy. Past, present and future bleed together, leaving – for all the talk about alienation and depersonalisation that often attends her work – nothing solid but the human soul, hungry for intimacy at a time when the ability to ground oneself in the world feels increasingly rare. “Everything is a datum and everything performs for data,” Cao wrote recently in Artforum; “By the time we are about to leave this world, we might feel like we have never lived.”
When watching Cao’s films it’s easy to evoke Fredric Jameson’s (in)famous statement that the contemporary subject is stuck “in a perpetual present”, incapable of willing themselves into a new future and condemned to revisit the past through shallow aesthetic iconography. In Asia One (2018) there’s a brief interlude in which a dance troupe runs amok around the warehouse, mimicking Maoist revolutionary ballet styles and using conveyor belts and mail sorting bags as props. In Nova (2019), a young man becomes lost in something like a cyberspace purgatory, shuttling between future, present and past. Elsewhere, an old man, dressed in Imperial-era clothing with a long beard, busks next to a young fashionable 20-something with DJ equipment. But while Jameson rues this collapse of time-coherence, Cao welcomes it, believing it can allow us to uncover our desires in the present. “[…]maybe I want to escape the timeline and just swim across it,” she told Dazed; “Maybe we can bring unrealised hope and unrealised disappointment from the past into the future, making it real again.” The stakes of such an interrogation feel particularly high; in La Town (2014), tiny plastic figurines, some splattered in red, stand, sleep, and dance. Our own world begins to look increasingly precarious, and therefore more precious. It could be taken away from us at any time.
‘Blueprints’ is replete with this ambivalent, slippery magical thinking: Cao’s utopias are suffused with melancholic regret, and her factory-like dystopias full of moments of joy and connection. What is remarkable is how these works, wistful and playful at once, are able to hold onto these contradictions, particularly given how frequently commentaries on the groundlessness of the contemporary condition turn into pessimism or nostalgia for a high modernism that believed in meaning. Cao’s subjects – China’s youth, factory workers, and the disaffected – don’t have the luxury of looking back on a 20th century Western movement that shut them out them from the start, nor does that period – marked by civil war, external wars, poverty, and revolution – carry particularly fuzzy memories. Rather, it is this new incoherent world of collapsed time, collapsed space, international supply chains and infinite timelines that provides them with a future; it is from this mixed and broken inheritance that they will have to patch together something resembling a happy life. Of course, this often entails fantasy: in an interview about her 2004 Cosplayers, which was not included in this exhibition, Cao noted that the young people she filmed “have lost their power” due to China’s rapid transformations; that “they can only imagine they have power when they dress up”. Likewise, in Whose Utopia (2006), men and women in the light bulb factory showcase their creative talents in the workplace: a woman dressed in a white tutu dances ballet; a man in black performs tai chi while factory labour continues around them, unabated.
Perhaps this appeal to the fantastic reads as a capitulation – the world gives you no power, so concoct a fake one in which you have it. But unlike the grand ambitions of the 20th-century artists who wanted to change the world through their work, Cao harbours few illusions about what the medium can and cannot do. “I don’t think that art can change the world,” she told Design Anthology; “I think politics can change the world, but art can provide a different perspective and open audiences’ minds to understand that the world can either be like this or like that.” Cao’s dreamscapes “function as a counterpoint to reality”. It’s a place, she says, “for a walk, a trance, a look around, or a weep.” If incoherency is our inheritance, we may as well see what it can unlock. And this play might lead us to something resembling freedom. Whose Utopia ends with an assembly of workers looking straight into the camera, their t-shirts together spelling out: “my future is not a dream”. As Lee Edelman observes in No Future, a public life spent in anticipation of a greater future – in this case signified by the figure of the heteronormatively-inflected child – sidelines questions of existing in the present. What new ways of being and social organisation can be uncovered if we resist this mandatory optimism, this living in service of a perpetually out-of-reach horizon? Swim across the timeline and uncover the past; refuse the appeal to inch towards progress “for our children’s generation”; bring in utopia, now.
Rebecca Liu is a staff writer at Another Gaze.
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