The Lost Generation
Bryony Roberts
On my recent visit to Beijing, I eagerly combed the Beijing art venues, hoping to find work that looked less "Chelsea" and more "Chinese." When Chinese contemporary art exploded the 1999 Venice Biennale, it was the lush but edgy paintings that received the most attention. In the past few years I have come to expect wry figurative paintings from contemporary Chinese artists–painters, such as Yang Shaobin, Yue Minjun, Wang Guangyi, and Fang Lijun, who use their academic training to paint unsettling portraits of communist society. This year, the galleries in Beijing did represent such paintings, but I began to see that this work is no longer the vanguard of Chinese art.
I entered Cao Fei’s recent show "COSPlayers" at the Courtyard Gallery in Beijing, and my first impression was that her lush, finely composed photographs of tableaux vivants and her surreal video could have appeared in a Chelsea gallery, and indeed they had. "COSPlayers," after premiering at Lombard-Freid in New York, made an oddly inverse commute, arriving at the Courtyard Gallery in Beijing–a sleek space owned by an American attorney.
Cao Fei, who is only 27, represents a new generation of artists with a different agenda. Cao Fei stated, her generation no longer has a clear target against which to rebel. In an atmosphere of greater government tolerance, these artists employ video, photography, performance as well as painting to explore the experience of living in a rapidly changing urban environment. Globalization has brought them into contact with Western contemporary art, which explains the increasing visual similarity, but their concerns remain unique to present-day China. Cao Fei’s achievement is in combining existing genres to offer a new kind of critique of a new Chinese society.
"COSPlayers" is an exhibition of photographs and a video that Cao Fei shot in her native city of Guangzhou (formerly Canton). At the southeastern tip of China, just north of Hong Kong, Guangzhou is the capital of the Guangdong province, where private capital is fuelling rapid urban development. Her subjects are teenagers obsessed with Japanese anime who dress up as their favorite characters and act out dramatic battles atop grey skyscrapers.
These role-playing games are called Cosplay (short for costume play) and they take place all over the world, from Dallas to Singapore. Unlike the badly shot photographs on Cosplay websites, and there are millions of them, Cao Fei’s images are meticulously constructed–the costumes elaborate, the urban backgrounds carefully chosen and the characters rigidly posed. She captures these characters as they confront one another in front of banal cityscapes, and at rest, still colorfully spandexed, in their homes. In A Ming at Home, a sexy S&M-styled warrior lounges in a chair, her uninterested father reads the paper beside her. The strength of this project is in the combination of the highly theatrical battle tableaux and the ‘candid,’ often hilarious, home shots.
Cao Fei has long been curious about role-playing. She has been involved in theater since her adolescence and continues to direct experimental productions. Recent videos and photographs show her friends dressed up in outrageous costumes striking exaggerated poses. In recently commissioned projects for a fashion magazines, she created a series of photographs parodying commercial advertisements. Saturated with campy, candy colors, these chaotic scenes feature vapid models toying with an excess of commercial products. In her Rabid Dogs series, which included a video, she took this interest in commercialism to an extreme by showing Burberry-clad humans pretending to be dogs and frolicking around a corporate office.
With the COSPlayers series, Cao Fei has joined the many contemporary artists–Justine Kurland, Hellen van Meene, Anna Gaskell, Rineke Dijkstra–who are creating somewhat staged, vaguely theatrical, but still ‘documentary’ photographs of adolescents. Cao Fei is following in this genre, but she unites an anthropological interest in adolescents with another popular, and adolescent, topic–fantasy. A desire for escapism has found many manifestations in recent art: science fiction scenes, enchanted forests, psychedelic pleasure worlds and playhouses. But by showing us the role-playing fantasies of a specific population and locating them in their urban context, Cao Fei is giving us a far broader picture than most artists do. We do not simply see the reality of adolescence or the allure of fantasy, but the tension between the two.
By combining a documentary style with fantasy imagery, Cao Fei creates images that are poignant and ultimately critical of her society. Her characters play against the backdrop of global capitalism–skyscrapers, housing projects, freeway overpasses, subways and anonymous office parks. In order to escape this world, the Chinese youths have turned to Japanese culture, sidestepping China’s longstanding enmity for Japan. The tragedy of these scenes is that despite the elaborate costumes, the Cosplayers are still in the drab, polluted landscapes of twenty-first century China. Their fantasies will never grant them an escape.
The COSPlayers photographs are a strange echo of a series of photographs by Japanese artist Mariko Mori from, 1994. For Play With Me, Subway and Tea Ceremony, Mori dressed up as either an anime, sci-fi or computer game character and photographed herself into a quotidian urban scene. In Play With Me, she stands, decked out in a neon blue wig, a metallic breastplate and a short silver skirt, by an arcade, as businessmen file in after work. While Mariko Mori was enacting an objectification that occurs through fantasy media, Cao Fei depicts an attempt at liberation through role-playing. Mariko Mori took a confrontational stance toward consumers of pop culture, showing them the absurdity of their fantasies. Cao Fei, on the other hand, is far more sympathetic to her subjects. Her documentary style allows for a more complex perspective on escapism. Though she acknowledges the futility of fantasy, Cao Fei also offers possible explanations for its lure.
Cao Fei’s work is satisfying because of the degree to which it contextualizes issues of fantasy and adolescence. Instead of just photographing portraits of teenagers, appropriating anime culture or documenting the transformation of Chinese cities, she brings all of these elements together and shows us how they interact. To know the context that drives people to escapism and then to see them performing their fantasies is far more informative than simply to analyze fantasy imagery. The odd thing about these images, however, is how cool and detached they feel. The photographs are so aestheticized that their beauty glosses over the friction between the COSPlayers and their surroundings. The COSPlayers seem disconnected from their own game; even in their mock confrontations their expressions are blank, their arms raised in half-hearted postures. In pushing the beauty and the theatricality of these scenes, Cao Fei adds another layer of eeriness to her subject. Not only are the COSPlayers detached from the banal reality of their city, but they are also removed from their own fantasy.
