Mirror Life

Mirror Life First year grad seminar Inst: Ezra Shales, Andrea Gill

by Moyi Zhang 9/29/08

[12:26] Hug Yue: Come. Here you can listen to the sound of the ocean.

[12:28] China Tracy: Beautiful.

[12:28] Hug Yue: Yes, it is.

[10:20] Hug Yue: There is a cross over between RL and SL. [10:20] Hug Yue: as you know. It is hard to separate feelings.

[10:21] China Tracy: For me, I just can act myself in SL. [10:21] Hug Yue: We all do that. We do not act. We simply be who we are.

[10:22] China Tracy: Everybody is an actor in parallel world.

[10:22] Hug Yue: All the world is a stage...

[10:23] China Tracy: Some eyes watching us, we all in the film...

[12:18] China Tracy: Is my avatar my mirror?

[12:18] Hug Yue: Others it is reflection of things...Like aspirations.

[12:19] China Tracy: Sometimes I'm confusing the RL and SL. [12:19] China Tracy: I don't know where I am.

[12:18] Hug Yue: We all in the Panopticon...

[12:14] China Tracy: What do you think it about the digital world?

[12:17] Hug Yue: It's one that is dominated by youth, by beauty, and money.

[12:16] Hug Yue: And it's all an illusion.

[10:23] China Tracy: Where is the end?

[10:24] Hug Yue: If that is where the life takes us...That is where we go.

[10:24] China racy: In SL, people meet and miss.

[10:24] China racy: We met at one point, and then we missed each other.

[10:24] China Tracy: And nothing happened, nothing will happen...

[13:00] Hug Yue: The sun is coming up here.

[13:00] China Tracy: Yes. [13:02] Hug Yue: That was a beautiful song.

[13:02] Hug Yue: "When the prison doors are opened, [13:02] Hug Yue: the real dragon will fly out."

Second Life (abbreviated as SL) is an Internet-based 3D virtual world created entirely by its membership. Members assume an identity and take up residence in Second Life, creating a customized avatar or personage to represent themselves. The conversation above happened in “i. Mirror”, a three-part 28 minutes SL-machinima made

by Cao Fei. Her name is “ China Tracy” in the video. She first encounters “Hug Yue” playing the piano in an open plaza. They are seen together on a subway car that sails out of the city and into a verdant jungle before morphing into a hot air balloon, in a deserted diner, walking down a desolate alley that is suffused with. Their dialogue appears in a typewritten line across the bottom of the screen, as their actual communication did when they first met in cyberspace. Gradually it is revealed that China's handsome young swain is actually a 64 years old American, which is much older than she had thought, and he is

a communist. A little later, Cao met in person on her trip to Northern California, bringing together two of the unlikelier people to form a friendship, but for the metaverse: an elderly Marxist living in the capitalist US, and a young woman from formerly Communist, now “hyper-capitalist” China.

Cao Fei describes “i. Mirror” as a "virtual documentary" of her life in alternate reality. She was documenting those digital figures like they were real persons. Not only records stories from her Second life, “i. Mirror” is also a search for an individual existence and spiritual sustenance somewhere between reality and virtual life. “I knew that this world sometimes mirrored the real world. We are missing a lot of things in real life, the same as in Second Life...Second Life makes me figure out how to face real life.”

Cao Fei sees Second Life as an extension of the self. In it she has created another self, and through this virtual self she observes and understands her own depth and complexity while, at the same time, broadening its scope.

Our existing in relationship to the landscape of contemporary life means that the backdrop of our lives is constantly destroyed and reconstructed. We are powerless to experience eternity, and likewise have no way to define the world from a single perspective. The reality in “i. Mirror” challenges our conventional understanding and definition of society, and reveals the emotions she actually experienced while going beyond those dimensions into her second life. As a viewer in a real life, this experience moves me.

In fact, in all her previous work, she had always preferred “docu-drama”. It's a documentary, but it's also like a drama. Reality and fiction are all intertwined and can't be separated. When you watch her video, you may think it's a story. But it's actually a documentary on the process.

Same as the video piece “Whose Utopia” in Life on Mars. Modern China has been shaped by constant and often relentless transformation. What kind of world is that supposed to be? Not only Cao Fei, many Chinese artists got into close dialogue with those changing parts of society. In “Whose Utopia”, the video is such a real portrait of the factory, of the workers’ daily lives and also their fantasies, and aspirations. Scenes from the flow of the regular workday are interspersed with performances by a peacock dancer, a ballerina dressed as an angel, an electric guitar player and a break dancer. It documents the reality of their workplace contrasted with the dramatic scenes that are presented by the employees. I think “Whose Utopia” would be like a mirror reflects our lives and tells us the truth.

Cao Fei’s recently project “RMB City” seems to me an another good example of mirror life. RMB City is an online art community in the virtual world of Second Life also built by “China Tracy”. This project is an experiment exploring the creative relationship between real and virtual space, and is a reflection of China's urban and cultural explosion.

(RMB, or renminbi, literally meaning people’s currency) The city purloins iconic architecture from the near future of the actual city of Beijing and Shanghai, including the China Central Television Headquarters”, which here dangles form a crane as “People’s Entertainment Television,” and the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium, which here becomes a “People’s Park.” a flooded Tiananmen Square (“ People’s Water Park”, a slum, and a temple: all of which constitutes a sort of funhouse urban tumor, a master plan of “overabundant symbols of Chinese reality.”

“RMB City is not a city of magical mirror, it doesn't restore the full present, nor does it recall our reminiscence of the past. It's a mirror that partially reflects; we see where we were coming from, discover some of the "connections" that fill the pale zone between the real and the virtual, the clues of which get disturbed, enriched, and polished.

New orders are born, so are new, strange wisdom.”

Cao Fei is one of the rising stars of the latest generation of Chinese artists. As curator Hou Hanru once put it, “She has grown up in the world of electronic entertainments and advertisements prevailing within Hong Kong/Taiwan-style pop music, TV drama, computer games and new subcultures influenced by various global trends such as Japanese Manga, American Rap, and Hong Kong films...” Much of her works is filled with playful images of young people dressed up as anime characters.

Though her, we could find some clues what happened in Chinese contemporary art and in with the artists. She is also a mirror we could look into, to understand the Chinese contemporary society and contemporary life.