7 - Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises’ 209
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
Summary
Abstract
This chapter examines the moving image works of Chinese artist Cao Fei as a response to China's rapid urbanization and the transformation of its existing urban spaces, which are no longer shaped by socialism but instead by what this chapter considers as China's engagement with neo-liberalism, including and facilitated by globalization. In works like RMB City, Haze and Fog, Whose Utopia and Hip Hop Guangzhou, Cao Fei creates what she calls ‘magical metropolises.’ This chapter asks what kind of responses Cao's ‘magical’ works are to contemporary Chinese urbanization. As part of the answer to that question, it applies four hermeneutic frameworks to analyse the works themselves. The findings from each of those frameworks indicate that Cao's work not only reflects the current Chinese urban condition, but also participates and intervenes in it in various ways.
Keywords: gallery films, urbanization, re-enchantment, heterotopia, the gestural
Chinese visual artists have responded to urbanization in China in different ways. By now, the fact of its ultra-rapid urbanization is well known. Thomas Campanella (2008: 14) wrote that, ‘There were fewer than 200 cities in China in the late 1970s; today, there are nearly 700. […] Forty-six Chinese cities passed the one-million mark since 1992, making for a national total of 102 cities with more than a million residents. In the United States, we have all of nine such cities.’ This process is ongoing. Indeed, a 2014 plan foresees 100 million farmers moving into cities by 2020 (Johnson 2014). Although Campanella's focus is on architecture, he cannot avoid noting huge upheaval, pointing out that ‘[i]n Shanghai alone, redevelopment projects in the 1990s displaced more people than thirty years of urban renewal in the United States’ (2008: 15). Qin Shao (2013) even calls the frequent process of compulsory demolition against the will of the householder as part of urban development ‘domicide.’
The social, economic, material, and especially emotional and psychological impact of urbanization on almost every Chinese person's life has made it a frequent feature of cultural production, including in the visual arts. Soon after Tiananmen and the intensification of marketization in the early 1990s, a new wave of independent film-making shifted away from the epic history and exotic borderlands favoured by many so-called ‘Fifth Generation’ films to focus on rapidly changing contemporary city life (Zhang 2007; Berry, Lu, and Rofel 2010).
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- Information
- Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary ChinaUrbanized Interface, pp. 209 - 236Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018