Joey Chen

Figure 5: Marsha P. Johnson Statue at Stonewall National Monument Erlick, Eli. “Marsha P. Johnson Bust.” Photograph. Atlanta: CNN, n.d. From CNN: “A bust of Marsha P. Johnson went up near the Stonewall Inn as a tribute to the transgender activist.” https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/28/us/marshap-johnson-bust-new-york-trnd/index.html.

Creating an Open Stage: Media and Post-Studio Practices in the Work of Cao Fei

Joey Chen

A star in the contemporary art world, Cao Fei (b. 1978) is a Chinese multimedia artist whose versatile and prolific response to urban development and contemporary life has secured her spectacular exhibitions worldwide. Over her twenty-year career, Cao has spoken from a Chinese perspective, rooting her social activism and artistic investigations in the often-underrepresented lives of China’s working class, and the shifting societal structures that directly affect them. While retaining her specific frame of reference, Cao’s integration of various forms of media, as well as her socially engaging post-studio practices, have made her prominent in the global art scene, particularly the generation of artists who favor the expansive potential of social spaces over the confines of the studio. Through her works, Cao envisions and constructs a utopia for all. She conceptualizes an alternative community for the city, state, and the world, and more important, a social revolution which transforms the way we live, interact with others, and define ourselves. The combination of cultural specificity and a distinctly global reference frame notable in Cao’s work may be traced to the universally liberal and globalized cultural atmosphere of her home town. Born and raised in Guangzhou, China during the post-reform era, Cao and her generation have lived in a “confusing” time and place, as she puts it, resulting from high-speed urbanization.1 A megacity located in the heart of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, and one of the first areas in China to become affluent during the economic reform era, Guangzhou centralized the globalization and urbanization trend in the 1970s. With the increasing openness of the domestic socio-political environment, as well as the influx of overseas investment—facilitated by its two neighbors Hong Kong and Macau (both Western colonies at the time)—the PRD area underwent rapid industrial and technological development.2 The economic ties that Guangzhou and Hong Kong cultivated by virtue of their geographic proximity, are among many elements that connected them. The two regions also have in common the globally-influenced Cantonese pop culture whose effects can be found in songs, MTV, anime, and video games. These media form a common base of self-representation among pan-PRD citizens—mainly youths—a populus shaped by

1 Cao Fei, quoted in Carolee Thea, “Cao Fei: Global Player” (ArtAsiaPacific, 2006), 66. http://caofei.com/texts. aspx?id=14&year=2007&aitid=1. 2 D. J. Dwyer, “The Pearl River Delta” (Geography 74, no. 4, 1989), 362–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40571752.

urbanism and consumerism.3 The economic resources of the state, the accelerated modernization process, and the embrace of global culture across the region, all served as fields of inspiration and creative content for Cao. She stands as a representative of this period in China’s history, transmitting through her work the aspiration, gratification, fear, and confusion of her generation within a rapidly developing society. Cao’s cultural background has played a key role in formulating her ideological framework, activating an individual response to shifts in both interpersonal and societal structures that are expressed in her multifaceted artistic practices. Cao employs a variety of media, from more traditional photography and video to newer technologies such as virtual reality channels, and theatrical installations. These selfexplanatory, performative, and participatory approaches also allow Cao’s work to reach a wide global audience. Far exceeding the limits of traditional physical mediums, social space constitutes the expansive matrix of Cao’s art, a “map” of imagination and interpretation based on real-world encounters and contemporary lifestyles. Cao’s career began at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in the 2000s, where she produced short films shot on digital video, capturing her personal life and reactions to her social environment. The weaving of interpersonal and societal structures, which would become central themes in Cao’s practice, can be found in her early video work Father (2005), a documentary which portrays her own father’s devotion to his practice as an acclaimed sculptor specializing in official statues of public and political figures. The film captures his process of creating a government-commissioned life-size sculpture of Deng Xiaoping, former paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China and the honored initiator of Chinese economic reform (Figure 1).4 In her film, Cao follows her father at a close distance, capturing each phase of the statue’s construction—a work which became his celebrated artistic accomplishment—from molding to installation. Her intimate, reverent, yet objective lens evinces paternal kinship: we witness the dynamic of an ever-supportive parent and “rebellious” child who refuses to follow her successful father’s path to become a traditional realist artist, and instead delves into contemporary art, working from the fringes.5 Nevertheless, this documentary represents a reconciliation between the father and daughter – and between two generations of artists – as Cao embraces her father’s vocation in her work. Father does not stop at the bond between parent and child, interlacing family relationships

3 Nikita Yingqian Cai, “CAO FEI: When Random Characters Meet with Their Apparatus,” in Bentu: Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation: Cao Fei, Hao Liang, Hu Xiangqian, Liu Chuang, Liu Shiyuan, Liu Wei, Liu Xiaodong, Qiu Zhijie, Tao Hui, Xu Qu, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, ed. Suzanne Pagé, Laurence Bossé, and Philip Tinari (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2016), 47. 4 Hanru Hou, “Politics Of Intimacy – On Cao Fei’s Work,” 曹斐 Cao Fei, accessed November 22, 2021, http://www.caofei.com/ texts.aspx?id=17&year=2008&aitid=1. 5 Ibid.

and personal psychologies with the broader social, economic, and political history of the state. As Cao explained in an interview, in the filming process she “began to rediscover [her] father as well as the relationship between him and his work and the rest of society.”6 She observed not only his daily work routine, but also the systematic construction of figurative monuments utilized as propaganda models for state politics. By depicting the state’s official sculptor’s devotion, to both his work and political figures such as Deng, the film catalyzes a critical contemplation of publicly-worshipped heroes and transformative milestones in the rapid social development of modern China. In expanding the microcosmic personal narrative, and relating it to a wider social framework, Cao substantiates her matrix of art via filmic storytelling. In subsequent work, Cao delves deeper into the fabric of social space and continues to experiment with diverse mediums, notably computational technology. In the RMB City series (2007-2011), located on the virtual reality platform Second Life, the artist creates the eponymous place (inspired by the Chinese currency RMB) as an online utopia. Cao, using the virtual identity of her avatar China Tracy, is the city’s architect and its first citizen. An island located in the middle of an infinite sea, RMB City’s built environment comprises construction scaffolding, a condensed grouping of urban skyscrapers, historical sites, and contemporary entertainment facilities, inter alia (Figure 2). Avatars flying across the ocean survey the city from a bird’s eye view, which allows them to see the urban Chinese scenery replete with monumental structures. We find replicas of the spinning Ferris wheel above Tiananmen Square, Shanghai’s giant tilted building with its marked pink orbs resembling the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, and the symbolic hollow steel structure of Beijing’s Olympic Stadium. Also salient are the totems of industrialization and urbanization, such as the huge chimney spewing flames and polluting smoke, numerous ships speeding in and out of the harbor, and airplanes gliding over the terraced fields in the slits of buildings of the central business district.7 These familiar emblems in these virtual cityscapes may remind Second Life users of the world outside their screens, yet the conglomerates of buildings which are located miles apart in reality, and the visibly collapsing landmarks, reaffirm that this is a second life. This is the time and space of a new urban world looming over the present. In Cao’s art, technology is not merely a self-sufficient material support; it is an evolving medium and language co-constructed by author and viewer. To experience and interact with these cityscapes, viewers must register their Second Life accounts, select a virtual avatar, learn the game, and then navigate and build the virtual city together

6 Cao Fei and Cao Chong’en, “Me and My Father,” interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, 曹斐 Cao Fei, June 2007, http://www. caofei.com/texts.aspx?id=18&year=2007&aitid=1. 7 Cao Fei, “RMB City: Online Urbanization,” 曹斐 Cao Fei, http://www.caofei.com/works.aspx?year=2007&wtid=3.

with Cao.8 In turn, the virtual residents of the RMB City become actors—even artists themselves—as their activities are recorded and integrated as part of the work. In sub-projects of the RMB City series, such as the “New World Gala” (2009) and the “Naked Idol Contest” (2010), Cao organizes a variety of events and invites her real-life friends to participate. The former is a celebrity gala, complete with annual mayors’ inauguration speeches; the latter, loosely following the model of Television “Idol” contests, invites users to display their nude avatars and gives out awards.9 Thus the city becomes a live theater, staging autonomous performances, which are performed by virtual incarnations of existing people. In “RMB City Manifesto,” Cao writes, “let all the virtualreal conflicts vanish in RMB City.”10 The artist and her audience toggle between the virtual and the real, past and present, and meet each other in a liminal space that intertwines their dreams and their lives. Employing the virtual reality technology, Cao not only creates a simulated city space, but also activates it as a vibrant social community that welcomes global participants and facilitates communal gatherings. Nevertheless, in order to render these virtual and temporal encounters tangible for exhibitions, collections, and preservation, the construction process of RMB City alongside the virtual events it hosted, have been translated into videos and displayed as separate artworks. In 2014, the naked idol competition was displayed at Hong Kong’s Para Site Gallery as a video piece.11 The pitfalls of inter-semiotic translations are that they halt the participatory evolution of Cao’s virtual worlds, fossilizing them in material media. However, having plunged into a practice which explores social space, Cao is not one to be bound by these limitations. Indeed, she has managed to transcend the limits of mastering a single medium, continuing to immerse herself in the experimentation and integration of diverse materials. Through her post-studio works, Cao moves her practice out of the traditional atelier into actual space, soliciting broader social contexts and new conversations, thus lending a more profound relational significance to her works.

For Cao, whose former studio was demolished by the bulldozers of urbanization, making art in the contact zones of interpersonal and relational spaces and conceiving of an “urban studio,” was her response to the rapid social developments of industrialization and globalization in China during the 2000s, which she developed in her art as a public-oriented advocacy of social engagement.12 In her

8 Chris Berry, “Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises,’” in Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interface, ed. Minna Valjakka & Meiqin Wang (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 219-220. 9 “Events,” RMB City Blogs, accessed December 12, 2021, http://rmbcity.com/category/events/. 10 Cao Fei, “RMB City Manifesto,” in Cao Fei: I Watch That Worlds Pass By, ed. Renate Wiehager and Christian Ganzenberg (Berlin: Daimler Art Collection, 2015), 199. 11 Chris Berry, “Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises,’” 220. The exhibition at Parasite: “Ten Million Rooms of Yearning. Sex in Hong Kong,” Para Site, August 1, 2014, https://www.para-site.art/exhibitions/ten-million-rooms-of-yearning-sex-in-hong-kong/. 12 Chris Berry, “Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises,’” 211-212.

off-line practices, Cao was particularly drawn to investigating the influence of an idealized construction of the individual on societal standards. She questioned the modes of life: appearances, careers, family dynamics, which were given preference over others. For instance, in the 2006 project titled Whose Utopia, (Figure 3), she based herself at a factory of the Osram corporation outside Guangzhou, a light bulb manufacturer for the transcontinental conglomerate Siemens. Cao spent six months on site observing, interviewing, and documenting the workers’ daily lives to understand their perception of globalization and industrialization as frontline recruits of these contemporary developments.13 Cao’s committed efforts at sustained interactions with these “actors” generated deep insights into her subject, which are reflected in the final work. As the artist has readily acknowledged, her conversations with these workers changed her perception—held by many people, worldwide—of the factories as “sweatshops.” She asked the workers about “their dreams for themselves in life.” The majority had aimed to move from rural areas to big cities and learn skills to liberate themselves from previous hardship. Eventually, to paraphrase Cao, she understood that many had realized those dreams in this very factory.14 Whose Utopia thus develops a perspective that exceeds the documentary; it both represents and elevates the labor force, not only questioning how industrialization shapes individuals, but also enabling the deeply meaningful connections between these individuals to thrive on screen. The project incorporates multiple media, including a newspaper titled Utopia Daily, installations, performances carried out on site by factory workers, and a 20-minute film. Among the multiple media, the video, with its combination of audio and visual testimony, is mesmerizing and powerfully engages the viewer. Cao encourages us to join her in reflecting on how the microcosm of society at large—in this case, the social space of the factory —confines and reconstructs the minds of individuals within it. The film is divided into three subsections, which stand in radical contrast to each other in content and effects. The first part, “Imagination of Product,” juxtaposes an automated assembly line (producing light bulb components) with a human production line. This shift from human action /production to that of benumbed, machine-like operators, alludes to the exploitative working environment. In the second section, “Factory Fairytale”—signaled by a sentimental melody—portrays individual workers, dressed in either dance costumes, work uniforms, or casual wear, dancing or playing musical instruments in the factory in slow motion, surrounded by the assembly lines and their seemingly indifferent colleagues. This section closes with a woman lying on her bed, looking out over the industrial district and the distant cityscape shrouded in haze, followed by a contemplative caption, “you cry and say, ‘[the] Fairytale is a

13 Jérôme Sans, “Interview: Cao Fei A Virtual Paradise,” in Breaking Forecast: 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists, ed. Qiao Cui and Yun Chen (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2010), 46. 14 Jérôme Sans, “Interview: Cao Fei A Virtual Paradise,” 46.

lie’.” The finale, “My Future is Not a Dream,” returns to the routine factory scene. It features shots of individual factory staff standing still at their designated workstations, smiling, and staring at the camera. It concludes with a scene of seven workers wearing T-shirts printed with Chinese characters, which, read in conjunction, means “my future is not a dream.”15 The video’s portrayal of minutiae, focusing on the factory workers’ iterative actions and delicate emotions, represents the culmination of Cao’s post-studio practice—rendering visible the oftenoverlooked subtle relations and interactions which materialize a community like the Osram factory— encapsulating her observations and understanding of this micro-society. Inserting seemingly absurd depictions of dancing workers amongst scenes of factory production, for instance, appears as an attempt on the part of the artist to withdraw the workers from the perpetual, exploitative industrial apparatuses, even if fictively, and only momentarily. As with RMB City, Cao situates the factory workers/performers in liminal spaces, in a fairytale or a utopia that she constructs that imagines a space for them to realize their dreams—their true aspirations as human beings, not just as labor force. Nonetheless, by offering such a “liberating” experience, Cao is not suggesting an escape from reality, but rather, she is telling a “lie,” constructing a temporary, alternative zone that keeps individuals “in suspension.”16 Though the workers perform within the factory space; many still wear their uniforms. Reality awakens them from their dancing dreams, returning them to an alienated, enclosed space, in which they are surrounded by machinery. Industrial production becomes the only realizable dream. Thus, derived from Cao’s interactions with the frontline working class in this social space, Whose Utopia poses questions for society about the impact of industrialization and globalization on the ordinary individual, asking whether and for whom the social ‘progress’ is liberating. In this regard, Cao is speaking not merely for the factory workers in China, but for every human being who is enmeshed in the social matrix and effected by radical social transformation. As much as she engages the universal intersubjective nature of social space in her work, and the impact of industrialization and globalization on individuals, Cao remains acutely sensitive to her own response to social transformation, or disruption. Her 2020 project, Isle of Instability, is an urgent reckoning with the global Covid pandemic, stemming from her quarantine. It documents the artist’s experience of self-isolating and adapting to life in a foreign country under lockdown, trapped with her

15 The description in this paragraph can be sourced to the original film, in “Cao Fei (曹曹) - Whose Utopia, 2006,” YouTube (Public Delivery, May 8, 2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB0qJC2sp_0.; translation of the last scene can be found in David Hodge, “‘Whose Utopia?’, Cao Fei, 2006,” Tate, February 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cao-whoseutopia-t12754. 16 Chris Berry, “Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises,’” 222.

family in a Singapore apartment for ten-months. To produce this piece, Cao turned the domestic space into an art creation hub, utilizing domestic objects as her media. A video filmed on the artist’s iPhone is at the center of the work, showing an artificial mini “island”—doubling as a stage— made of stacked green bedsheets forming an undulating shape of land, complete with potted plants resembling the palm trees characteristic of tropical locales. While a TV in the background displays seascapes; her nine-year-old daughter plays the island’s only survivor (Figure 4).17 Cao reacts to a time of instability and collapse in a casual, entertaining way, while examining the psychological and material impact of social isolation on individuals, families, and even all humankind. Her immediate and intuitive grasp of all available media in her midst, despite the material and technological limitations of the context, indicate her expansive creativity as an artist unconstrained by medium. Her art demonstrates how human beings find possibilities amid constraints and adjust to unfamiliar spaces, while simultaneously illuminating the external crises which force us to adapt. For its 2020 display in Shanghai, Cao elaborated the work as a multimedia installation. The exhibition featured a room inside a room, and an island inside an island, in which ‘landscaping’ exaggerated the aforementioned faux-natural elements, like the artificial palm encircling the young performer, and wide-screen imagery of beach and seascape. The bright projection screen, displaying the life of Cao’s daughter on her island, resembled a kind of technological site of isolation itself. The island, according to the artist, is symbolic of both self-exile and self-construction, a place of both paradise and imprisonment.18 Fused with absurd artificiality, endless repetition, and entrapping ambiguity, Cao’s installation constrains everyone entering her constructed heterotopia, tapping into their collective memory of the moment, and recasting what might have otherwise seemed instinctive (albeit eccentric) responses to the time of social isolation, disruption, and reconstruction. Situated in the global art scene, Cao joins a communal conversation among contemporary artists from around the world, such as Isa Genzken (German, b. 1948) and Pipilotti Rist (Swiss, b. 1962), concerning the interrelationship between individuals and society, as well as the examination of post-studio artistic creations. The spirit of Genzken’s monumental rose sculptures installed amid densely packed city skyscrapers, for instance, is comparable to Cao’s shot of a worker in a peacock dress dancing in the Osram factory in Whose Utopia, both of which present a surreal coalescence of absurdity and reality. Another work that has notable commonality with Whose Utopia is Rist’s video piece Ever Is Over All

17 “不安之岛[Isle of Instability]” in 曹斐：时代舞台[Cao Fei: Staging the Era], ed. UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Photographic Press, 2021), 14 18 Harriet Lloyd-Smith, “Cao Fei on Collective Confinement and the Significance of Home ,” Wallpaper* (Wallpaper*, November 13, 2020), https://www.wallpaper.com/art/cao-fei-audemars-piguet-west-bund-art-design-fair.

(1997), which juxtaposes slow-motion, placid scenes of flower close-ups with the moving images of a woman in a blue dress—recalling Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz—walking down a city street and joyously smashing car windows with a flower bouquet. In works of startling visual impact, which combine familiar references from real life and wild imaginings of radical alternatives, Genzken, Rist, and Cao merge the quotidian and the absurd, reality and fantasy, social dominators and outcasts, subjectivity and detachment. The three artists simultaneously chose a dramatic expression to build utopias, alternative and liberating spheres away from reality, that attempt to free the subjects, flowers, factory workers, or women -from their prescribed roles, appearances, and relationships in the dominant social environment.

The common ground in the works of Genzken, Rist, and Cao, especially their handling of social space, places the Chinese artist into the expanded field of post-studio art, which are practices consciously detached from the constraints of conventional spaces of creation. Artists of this kind tend to draw inspiration from their interactions across a vast range of situations. It should be noted that with her unique lens of acutely conscious observation, and the cultural specificity embedded in her works, Cao also adds multifaceted diversity to the post-studio generation. In contrast to Genzken’s subjective narrative, such as her film Chicago Drive in which the artist offers a guided tour of the metropolis while narrating her interactions with the urban environment, Cao typically assumes the role of an observer. She looks from a neutral place at urban society, whether it is the lives of factory workers, the culture of hip-hop, or Cosplayers.19 In her portrayals of characteristic groups affected by the era of rapid social change, Cao prefers to objectively document the everyday lives of the Chinese, rather than engage in or foster any explicit forms of intervention through her artistic practice. She empowers the audiences to generate their individual interpretations and experience the work in an organic and vibrant way, constantly renewing it through human interaction rather than framing it in a static and inanimate state. Moreover, Cao contributes her distinctive cultural perspective in envisioning a utopian world. Both Genzken and Rist embed their creations in imaginative and romantic imagery with ecstatic and unbridled absurdity – either sculptural immense flowers blooming in concrete constructions, or a hysterical woman breaking car windows with a tender and feminine flower bouquet. In comparison, Cao constructs a utopia of realism between the real and the ideal, in which a virtual city comprises real-life infrastructure, factory workers pursue their dreams on the production line, and a tropical island is built from found household objects. In this regard, Cao renews the conceptualization of utopia by her Western post-studio artist peers, rooting her practice in a distinctive cultural frame of reference and eliciting deep reflections from her direct

observations of Chinese society. Meanwhile, Cao’s perspective addresses broader social issues that are globally ubiquitous—based on the interrelationships, enforced and imposed, between individuals and social space—which, in turn, render her works more relevant to international viewership. Not only does Cao energize the post-studio generation with a fresh Chinese perspective, but she also expands the conventional definition and familiar practices of post-studio art by extending her creative process from social spaces to the exhibition sites themselves, constantly transforming and regenerating her material media in an almost organic way. Her artworks are rarely sealed or considered complete; they shift from a single video into a multitude of projects in other media. Her works continue to develop in the planning and execution of each exhibition. Beyond the projection screens that museums and galleries employ to show her films, Cao integrates found objects and wall decorations, and incorporates the structure of the art institution itself to present her projects, turning each installation into an unreproducible, site-specific artwork. For instance, in both recent shows, “HX” at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2019) and “Blueprints” at London’s Serpentine (2020), Cao debuted her four-year research project on the Hongxia Theatre—centered on a 1950s cinema in Beijing undergoing demolition in the interest of so-called urban regeneration –staging the workd differently at each venue. The Pompidou installation featured randomly scattered archival fragments, documents such as newspapers, photographs, and furniture from the old cinema (which simultaneously serve as projection screens for the moving images). Thus, she reconfigured, or re-staged frozen memories of the vanishing cinema.20 By contrast, the Serpentine installation conveyed a more coherent historical narrative, with the first room recreating the old cinema’s lobby with its green walls, wooden reception desk, and red velvet curtains which originally led into the theatre. The set was almost an exact restoration of the cinema’s interior in the 1950s. Entering this exhibition, viewers were immediately brought back to the golden age of the Hongxia Theatre, thus embarking on a journey of recollecting the vanishing history, following the artist’s narrative. In some cases, Cao has even gone further, turning exhibition spaces or her own personal studio into a medium for experimenting, via an integral and dynamic theatrical performance occupying the entire space. Her most recent retrospective show “Cao Fei: Staging the Era” at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2021) illustrates this approach. In her own words, Cao made “a project as an exhibition, a public space in interior space, and a ‘Disney Park’ that belongs to the artist.”21 Her storytelling starts from the Artist Room at the entrance, displaying the various cultural influences

20 Gowri Balasegaram, “HX,” ArtAsiaPacific, accessed November 22, 2021, https://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/WebExclusives/ HX. 21 Cao Fei and Philip Tinari, UCCA Exhibition | “Cao Fei: Staging the Era” Virtual Guided Tour, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2021, 4:10-4:30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TseqfhihBYI.

in her life, including art books and DVDs. On entering the main space, the audience is greeted by a compact landscape simulating an urban courtyard, composed of lightboxes, plants, and fountains, while surrounded by a steel fortification with multiple passages leading to small rooms housing the stage sets of her various projects (Figure 5). As the scenarios unfolded, the sounds and images on the projection screens intertwined, turning the exhibition space into a discotheque. Not merely following the footsteps of the artist along her professional journey, the audience was situated in the midst of a party, their active participation through movement and conversation transforming the steel and concrete scaffolding of the exhibition into a live performance and a social organism. Throughout her transition from relying on a single medium to the incorporation of unbounded interpersonal and affective connections, Cao has established a multi-dimensional and regenerative mode of expression, rooted in everyday life, which constantly produces new social meaning. Cao’s move into the social sphere carved out a place among her post-studio contemporaries, while consolidating the distinct cultural perspective of her work and its means of intervention. As a result of her ability to grasp and interweave multiple scales of narrative, shifting from minute familial connections to constructing an entire virtual universe in which to stage infinite relationships, the scope of her work (and audience) successfully reaches a global scale. Intersubjective space has created a matrix for Cao, who continually updates her responses to social transformation, alternating between private reflections and popular memory, between the real and the virtual. She maps out this framework for her audiences through a multilayered media discourse that connects disparate audiences in the utopian social space she constructs in her works, while entrusting to the stage the hands of her viewers who can reconfigure, regenerate, and reform social reality.

Figure 1: Cao Fei, Video still from Father, 2005. Caofei.com, http://www.caofei.com/works. aspx?year=2005&wtid=3.

Figure 2: Cao Fei, still from RMB City: A Second Life City Planning by China Tracy (aka: Cao Fei), 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Figure 3: Cao Fei, Video still from Whose Utopia, 2006. Video (color, sound), 20:20 min. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.

Figure 4: Cao Fei, Video still from Isle of Instability, 2020. Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. Image courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet.

Figure 5: Installation view of “Cao Fei: Staging the Era,” 2021. UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Photo: Stefen Chow.

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Photographing Egypt: Opposing the Expression of a Colonialist Lens

Caroline Cook

Though sight may be considered a biological foundation to the human experience, the act of seeing is not neutral. Seeing and being seen are expressions of power involving a complex transference of authority between subject and viewer. If a look shared by pedestrians is fraught with tension, biases, and judgment, then it is no wonder that the colonialist gaze inflicted upon ‘the Other’ in nineteenthcentury Egypt illustrated a capacity for violence intrinsic to vision.1 At the time of European colonialism in North Africa, a growing popularization and an improvement of cameras typified the imbalance of control between an artist’s frame and its subject, creating parallels between photographic and militaristic language of “shooting” and “being shot.”2 Thus, when Western Europeans became obsessed with past empires and traveled to ancient Egyptian ruins throughout the mid-1800s, their photographs expressed imperial visions. Modern civilizations saw ruins as evidence of archaic societies fit for colonization. This attitude influenced photographers of other origins, too, such as those from across the Ottoman Empire working for the Ottoman elite. Though heralded throughout museums and academic institutions, landscape photographers of nineteenth-century Egypt employed the hierarchical ideologies embedded in their societies to frame their subjects. Therefore, they must be reevaluated as expressing colonialist ideas that presented photographed subjects according to a specific empire’s generic vision of them. Doing so allows us to discover more productive ways of understanding both their work and the lasting effects of colonialism. Photographer John Beasley Greene’s images must be recontextualized within the work of his contemporaries, specifically those who called nineteenth-century Egypt home. One of Greene’s most recognizable photographs, to historians and Euro-American tourists fascinated by Egypt, is titled Giza. Sphinx, dating to 1853-54 (fig. 1). The image depicts the Great Sphinx at Giza surrounded by an endless landscape of sand and a distant pyramid. The angle at which Greene positioned the camera captured the Sphinx in a three-quarters view. The viewer is unable to look the Sphinx directly in the eye; rather, the

1 Sumathi Ramaswamy and Martin Jay, ed., Empires of Vision: A Reader, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 2. 2 Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin, Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 149.

Sphinx’s never-ending gaze is directed at a point beyond both the lens of the camera and of the viewer. The front body of the Sphinx is its only body part that is entirely visible, which makes the monument appear as if it is rising from a burial beneath sprawling sand dunes and under an unchanging sky. The image is stark and nostalgic, romanticizing a distant past that has no tie to the lives occurring nearby. Although another one of Greene’s photographs attests to the existence of an excavation occurring on the left side of the Sphinx at the time this photograph was taken, Giza. Sphinx hides any evidence of living people engaging with the monument, presenting it as a lifeless ruin immensely far from contemporary human activity.3 Another of Greene’s photographs turned the focus away from human life while featuring a defining element of the Egyptian landscape. The image is entitled Études de dattiers (Studies of Date Palms), dating to 1854 (fig. 2). While the photograph is not of an ancient monument or architectural ruin, date palms became identifying symbols of North African landscapes in the eyes of Europeans, due to their preponderance in photographs.4 In Études de dattiers, three date palms rise above a still riverbank, standing motionless in front of a cloudless, colorless sky. Occupying the center of the scene with the date palms is a tent that houses a blurry figure. Though the image seems to concentrate on both the date palms and the tent, the title of the image makes no mention of the tent, a sign of local contemporary life. This neglect is characteristic to the titles and compositions of Greene’s photographs, which consistently emphasize objects of European nostalgia such as monuments, excavated ruins, and recognizable elements of nature over contemporary North African society.5 In Études de dattiers, Greene not only excludes the tent and human figure from the title, but he also positions them within the composition so that they are dwarfed in size by the towering date palms; they are blurred and obscured, transformed into incidental components of the landscape that are secondary to symbols of North Africa favored by the Western European gaze. Greene’s suppression of contemporary life from its own landscape as a means to emphasize what Western Europe wished to see parallels the colonialist choice to view North African societies as inferior for their differences. A French-American who died in 1856 at the age of 24, John Beasley Greene took hundreds of other photographs during his trips to ancient Egyptian monuments, in 1853 and 1855. Around the decades in which he lived and worked, Western Europeans became fascinated by ancient landscapes beyond their

3 Jessica Leigh Hester, “The Strange Emptiness of Egypt in 19th-Century European Photographs,” Atlas Obscura, November 21, 2019, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/photographing-egypt-archaeology-john-beasley-greene. 4 Hester, “The Strange Emptiness of Egypt in 19th-Century European Photographs.” 5 Michael Press, “Photography’s Potential as Art and Science in Documenting Ancient Egypt,” Hyperallergic, November 19, 2019, https://hyperallergic.com/526963/john-beasley-greene-sfmoma/.

A star in the contemporary art world, Cao Fei (b. 1978) is a Chinese multimedia artist whose versatile and prolific response to urban development and contemporary life has secured her spectacular exhibitions worldwide. Over her twenty-year career, Cao has spoken from a Chinese perspective, rooting her social activism and artistic investigations in the often-underrepresented lives of China’s working class, and the shifting societal structures that directly affect them. While retaining her specific frame of reference, Cao’s integration of various forms of media, as well as her socially engaging post-studio practices, have made her prominent in the global art scene, particularly the generation of artists who favor the expansive potential of social spaces over the confines of the studio. Through her works, Cao envisions and constructs a utopia for all. She conceptualizes an alternative community for the city, state, and the world, and more important, a social revolution which transforms the way we live, interact with others, and define ourselves.

Creating an Open Stage: Media and Post-Studio Practices in the Work of Cao Fei

A star in the contemporary art world, Cao Fei (b. 1978) is a Chinese multimedia artist whose versatile and prolific response to urban development and contemporary life has secured her spectacular exhibitions worldwide. Over her twenty-year career, Cao has spoken from a Chinese perspective, rooting her social activism and artistic investigations in the often-underrepresented lives of China’s working class, and the shifting societal structures that directly affect them. While retaining her specific frame of reference, Cao’s integration of various forms of media, as well as her socially engaging post-studio practices, have made her prominent in the global art scene, particularly the generation of artists who favor the expansive potential of social spaces over the confines of the studio. Through her works, Cao envisions and constructs a utopia for all. She conceptualizes an alternative community for the city, state, and the world, and more important, a social revolution which transforms the way we live, interact with others, and define ourselves.