Art is simply politics’s sweeter tongue.

—Brother Day to Brother Dawn in Foundation, the 2021 Apple TV+ adaption of Issac Asimov’s 1951 sci-fi epic

Cao Fei is a Contemporary Chinese artist who has exhibited at New York’s PS1 (2016), Paris’s Pompidou Centre (2019), and London’s Serpentine Gallery (2020). Her current exhibition, My City is Yours, has found a fitting southern hemisphere home at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s new Naala Badu building, a cavernous space specifically designed for sprawling and spectacular contemporary art very much in the manner of Tate Modern and MoMA (and indeed, the building was originally named “Sydney Modern”).

The show itself is very hard not to like. As Shuxia Chen, a Sydney-based curator and academic, described in her review, My City Is Yours “bombards you with documentaries and sci-fi films, virtual reality (VR) games and vintage arcade machines, neon lights contrasting industrial metal scaffolds, and electronic jamming hip-hop music,” and combines a mix of “pleasure, convenience, banality, challenge and alienation condensed into the nostalgic, dazzling yet future-craving contemporary life.” As this frantic mèlange suggests, My City is Yours seems explicitly pitched at a younger, hipper audience. The show also evidences a strategic move by the Gallery to engage with Sydney’s Chinese community, as seen in the Chinese language advertising that has popped up around the city, in Haymarket and Chinatown(s).

The central idea that underpins the show’s flashy surface is, like much of Cao’s work, a particular understanding of utopia (Utopia was also the name of her solo show at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 2009). The term “utopia” was coined and popularised over five hundred years ago by Thomas More in his 1516 book Utopia. Written and published in Latin, it was a satirical and subversive political critique of English society. Divided into two contradictory parts, the book first describes the terribleness of the world as it exists, while the second is its imagined opposite, a mysterious inland named Utopia. Thus, for More, utopia has dual meanings: it denotes both a good, happy and ideal place (eutopia) as well as a nowhere (outopia), a place imagined but never able to exist. Society as a perfectly functioning mechanism is a concept that readily makes room for authoritarianism: as the speculative fiction author China Miéville has remarked, utopia is “an inescapable itch, but to scratch can draw blood.” In the modern era, examples of utopia’s inversion, dystopia, have proliferated in both science fiction novels (George Orwell, H.G. Wells, et al.) as well as in the very real horrors of modern history. In China, the idea and real practice of utopia cannot be separated from the historical influence and legacy of Mao. Harvard University’s Jie Li puts it bluntly:

During the Mao era, hundreds of millions of Chinese devoted themselves to the building of a better world yet suffered from hunger and strife at unprecedented scales. The revolutionary visions of bounty, equality, and community and the tragic realities of famine, violence, and destruction left behind two major paradigms for remembering ­those decades—as a series of never-to-be-repeated totalitarian crimes or as experiments of alternative modernity whose inspiring ideals should be rescued from their failures.

Cao’s engagement with utopia first clearly featured in a short film entitled Whose Utopia, produced between 2000 and 2006 as part of the Siemens Art Program. It is one of Cao’s strongest works and offers more space for reflection than other more spectacular works in the current show. The work, installed inside a “Utopia Factory” decorated by video, photographs, scaffolding, and metal bunk beds, was filmed at the Siemens OSRAM lighting factory in Foshan, the Pearl River Delta, southern China. The Delta has subsequently been identified by scholars and media as the “world’s factory”: ground zero for the mass manufacture of cheap consumer goods that flood global markets, including Australia. Millions of migrant labourers, also known as China’s “floating”, “suspended,” or “low-end” population (流动/悬浮/低端人口), have flocked from farms and undeveloped hometowns to assembly lines, also described as the “largest internal migration in human history.”

Whose Utopia is a sympathetic piece about (and for) these labourers of humble origins, limned by flecks of irony and ambiguity. Parts of the film seem to celebrate the dignity of their work, with the performers—real labourers in the factory—arranged in uniforms, hyper-focused on their job. Occasionally, the figure of a ballerina or fairy interrupts the scene, a figure for the workers’ imagined escape for their drudgery. A lonely woman quietly goes to bed, the factory so close that it can be seen just outside her window. The film’s final shots are of a group of young labourers changing into white t-shirts bearing the slogan “My Future is Not a Dream,” to the accompaniment of a song that sounds like a kitsch version of American country music.

The work juxtaposes the workers’ optimism with a cold reality: an unstoppable production line, a prosperous sign of China’s integration into the global economy after joining the WTO; their voluntary endeavour to depart from traditional craftsmanship to fit into modern industry; a collective pursuit of urban life to make a class leap despite the rigid hierarchy, regional disparities and household registration system that blocks them from settling in the city permanently. Social anthropologist Xiang Biao has explained that this transient migration is supposed to be short-lived and ephemeral, leaving minimal marks on the local society. Little energy is invested in systemic changes here and now, as people keep moving without an end in sight. Therefore, it partly explains why we see tremendous entrepreneurial energy in daily life in China but few bottom-up initiatives for social and political change. Chinese historian Qin Hui once pointed out that, aside from the advantages of low wages and low benefits, China’s poor human rights protections (Qin calls them “Low Human Rights Advantages” 低人权优势) allow it to push down the costs of the four critical factors of production—labour, land, capital, and non-renewable resources—and thus thrive in the era of globalisation.

Cao’s interest in producing contemporary art with a seemingly broader social function draws parallels with the practices of artists like Suzanne Lacey, Rick Lowe, and Jeanne van Heeswijk, who have undertaken community-based projects with the intention of catalysing social transformation in Europe and the United States. Cao, however, is working in a very different historical and political context. In China, no social transformation can be proposed or practised by any individual—except the state’s supreme leader. In the Xi era (since 2012), the social space for any protest and radical move is under constant surveillance by the state—to buy a kitchen knife in a grocery store, for example, requires that the buyer’s ID be recorded. An underground joke goes: “Nothing can be officially certified as radical in the light of the radically changing moods of the state’s supreme leader.” The opportunities for political activism and genuinely socially engaged art that elicits change are severely limited.

Despite this, Cao’s early works evinced a radicalism that drew from her contemporaries in Europe and the US. In an essay for Tate Modern, she has explained how movements like the Young British Artists impacted artists of her generation. “Like the YBAs,” Cao noted, late twentieth-century Chinese artists “sought to disclose the violence of globalisation: the threats of a monopolised economy, totalitarian rule, rigidity of artistic practice, and materialistic culture.” Similarly, early in 2006, when Cao’s Whose Utopia was ready for show, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (then the world’s busiest and most well-known contemporary art curator) wrote in an Artforum article that Cao is “a key member of the vibrant new generation of Chinese artists emerging in the early twenty-first century, a time marked by widespread optimism like that which existed in the US in the 1950s and 60s.” By December 2024, Cao found herself ranked thirteenth (tenth in 2023) on ArtReview’s “Power List” of the “snobbish” and “murky” art world’s most influential figures. Obrist, who promoted Cao to the global stage, was placed fifty-ninth.

The other key work in My City is Yours is the feature-length sci-fi lyric, Nova (2019), perhaps Cao’s most ambitious and most expensive (to produce) work to date. It is installed in a small, dark theatre, with a big screen. The theatre’s floor, covered with sand, also contains a fallen chandelier and a few chairs. The film’s narrative begins in the 1950s when two scientists—a Soviet woman and a Chinese man—fall in love when one is assigned to China to construct and test its earliest computer system. After the female scientist leaves Beijing, as part of the testing, the male scientist throws his son into another dimension, where he floats alone through time and space. The boy is given forty years—the length of China’s post-socialist transition—to find a way back, otherwise he will remain permanently stuck in limbo between the past and future. Beijing-based curator and scholar Beicheng Yang has argued that Nova’s nostalgia for the past has a utopian goal— one of reviving old socialist ideologies not as propaganda, but in order to recapture their transformative energies. In practice, however, it reminds me more of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014).

If Nova is a deliberately designed fantasy, then Whose Utopia is a somewhat realistic fiction. Ai Weiwei, who shot a bunch of rough and ultra-realist documentaries about China’s grassroots dissidents (and uploaded these to YouTube) is another globally celebrated contemporary Chinese artist, albeit one of a slightly older generation to Cao. Ai made it to number one on ArtReview’s power list in 2011, due to his eighty-one days of imprisonment by the state’s authorities. In 2013, Ai released a short heavy-metal musical, Dumbass, a parody of his prison life, which begins with Ai in a black hood bearing the word “suspect” and ends with him shaven and slathered in red lipstick, that unsurprisingly attracted plenty of media attention. Yet, as Cao’s star has risen, the appeal of Ai’s particular brand of trouble-making art has fallen. This is due not only to the strictures of the Xi era. Barbara Pollock, who promotes Chinese artists to a global audience (especially women of the younger generation), suggests that “a deeper form of self-censorship may be at play, brought on not by government censorship but by market forces.”

Unlike Ai’s provocative and easy-to-grasp social critique and maniac performance, Cao’s utopianism, so spectacularly put on display at the AGNSW, is mild and easy on the eyes. It is also far more pleasing and entertaining for the general public, and for institutions increasingly wary of criticism and controversy. A global contemporary art world that is weary of confrontational politics embraces Cao as an appealing alternative. She offers Chinese post-socialist visual elements bundled up in a mode of Western modern stream of consciousness, presenting Australian audiences with an experience that feels fun, entertaining and fundamentally, safe—both in and out of China.