The China Project

191 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection ZHOU Xiaohu In Zhou Xiaohu’s Utopian theatre 2006 installation, miniature clay figures re-enact important historical events that have been transmitted to the world via television. Each scene is modelled as a miniature theatre or movie set with television monitors showing the events in claymation. The scenarios depicted include a court in session, a United Nations committee hearing, and the busy Pudong district of downtown Shanghai, the events of 11 September 2001 at the World Trade Center, an assassination in full view of a legion of camera crews, and a lone helicopter struggling to save a rural community from a landslide. Centring on issues of surveillance and mass media, Utopian theatre evokes the principles of the panopticon. Designed by eighteenth-century English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon is a circular prison in which cells surround a central observation tower. 1 Bentham’s prison was based on the idea that discipline can be physically and psychologically administered by the possibility of being viewed at any time from a single vantage point. Each prisoner is aware of this seemingly perpetual observation and therefore forced to regulate their behaviour at all times. In Utopian theatre , the television news room, reporting from across the globe, could be said to operate as the panopticon’s central observation tower, and the individual clay sets are like the many cells of the prison that are constantly being watched. The use of technology to observe, direct and control has insinuated itself into the fabric of contemporary life: from the security cameras that watch our public movements in airports, banks and shopping malls to the phenomenon of email as a traceable official document; from the plethora of reality TV shows to the paparazzi’s search for the latest salacious moment in a celebrity’s personal life. Utopian theatre is critical of the blind consumption of momentous events as public entertainment, and conscious of technology’s role in conveying such scenes: by manipulating our familiarity with the subjects of a media-driven culture, Zhou Xiaohu probes our delight in accepting and consuming technology in contemporary life. He has said that: Our daily lives are lived and played out on the ‘stage’ of this ‘news machine’ . . . What is enacted is something that comes from both reality and deceit. It is a stage of events and a world which we have produced collectively and which we all take part in, which we entertain and consume ourselves. 2 Zhou Xiaohu’s miniature world stage is also a place where the search for an idealistic scheme of social and political reform is thrown into question. Utopian theatre highlights the dilemma facing rapidly developing contemporary China, poised between capitalist concepts of personal gain and economic growth and the elusive communist ideals of a collective utopia. endnotes Adapted from Zoe Butt, ‘Utopian theatre: Global puppet show’, in The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2006, pp.142-45. 1 Bentham’s panopticon has been instrumental in the discussion of the modern relationship between power and knowledge, particularly in relation to ideas of social conformity, most notably by the French theorist Michel Foucault. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , Vintage, New York, 1979. 2 Zhou Xiaohu, interview with Zoe Butt, July 2006. Translation courtesy of the Long March Project. opposite Utopian theatre (detail) 2006 11-channel video and fired-clay installation, 11 DVDs (1 minute each, colour, stereo), 11 television monitors, 10 sets of headphones / 189.5 x 456cm (diam., installed) / Purchased 2007. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund above Utopian theatre 2006 Installation view / Queensland Art Gallery 2005.