The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

43 ARTISTS Asia One (stills) 2018 HD video installation, 63:20 minutes, colour, sound, ed. 1/8 / Purchased with funds from Tim Fairfax ac through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2018 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Born 1978, Guangzhou, China Lives and works in Beijing, China Cao Fei’s work seamlessly blends astute social observations with popular and subcultural motifs — from communist history to cosplay — to form strange, beautiful and compelling imagery and environments. Working predominantly in film, video and installation, Cao Fei has also produced significant works via unorthodox media — on dating sites, in the online virtual world Second Life and on the towering facade of a Hong Kong skyscraper. 1 Cao Fei’s latest project focuses on the logistics hub of Jingdong, or JD.com, an online business-to-consumer retail giant, one of the most technologically advanced manufacturing and distribution facilities in China. Granted unprecedented access to interview JD.com employees, as well as to film onsite, the artist has created two new works, Asia One 2018 and 11.11 2018. Cao Fei previously examined the lives of workers at an Osram lighting factory in Guangdong in 2006 for the extraordinary video and installation series Whose Utopia , the work that brought her international attention. Other recent video and film productions have touched on the themes and aesthetics of science fiction and apocalyptic cinema, from zombie movies to the evocation of wartime trauma in the films of French director Alain Resnais, as they apply to the global cityscape. Asia One and 11.11 combine these stylistic approaches, while continuing these earlier works’ themes of utopia and dystopia. Asia One is a narrative video that imagines a near future in the fictional, fully automated Asia One Unmanned Warehouse. It follows the workday of a man and woman, who are the facility’s only human employees, along with their robotic assistant, through their daily humdrum, daydreaming and mischief-making, as a love triangle develops. Asia One explores the concept of historical transition, as the narrative centres on events that transpire in the year 2021, as interpreted by a group of futuristic beings who explore the abandoned site many years later. As bored workers play among the conveyor belts and goods chutes, or otherwise bide their time, imaginary dancers perform 1960s routines and Cultural Revolution-era model operas to the tune of 1990s pop hits, using gigantic desktop objects as props. This collapse of historical eras reflects Cao Fei’s long-term interest in China’s rapid social and economic transformations. She also argues that logistics — the link that binds contemporary industries in a global marketplace — might also connect the present and the future. In contrast, 11.11 takes a documentary approach to the intense workload experienced across the JD.com network ahead of China’s Double Eleven Festival, an annual data- and social- media-driven online shopping event held on 11 November. Through candid interviews with staff, Cao Fei poses the question of what future social ecologies might arise from such present-day developments. The integration of logistics with mass consumption, globalisation and technological acceleration — including significant innovations in data mining, artificial intelligence and automation — suggests myriad possibilities for the evolution of industry, but also for the daily experience of work, society and culture. Business models based on these intersections, with their air of inevitability, represent a glimpse of the future that is already familiar. In her provocative and prescient works, Cao Fei asks what role these present-day utopias might play in the grander narratives of historical development, especially in a China undergoing constant transformation. Reuben Keehan Endnote 1 Strangers 2015 was a set of small performances made for the live chat platform Omegle. RMB City 2007–11 was an immense virtual city that acted as a collaborative laboratory within Second Life. Same Old, Brand New 2015 used LED lights on the outside of the 490-metre-high ICC building on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour for a series of playful animations inspired by 1980s video games. CAO FEI