Hou Hanru Living With(in) the Urban Fiction (Notes on Urbanization and Art in Post-Olympic )

The Urban Fiction China is hot. Its modernization and development, marked by its economic boom and explosive urbanization, are amazingly spectacular. They signal the promise of a historic turning point towards a “Chinese century.” The ultimate expression of this boom and historic shift is, no doubt, the Beijing Olympics. Its opening event, being an extravaganza of spectacle, performed almost perfectly the task of showing off the newly gained power and pride of the nation.

To achieve such an effect, unprecedented mobilization of financial and human resources were necessary. The organizers hired some of the most celebrated artists, both from China and abroad, to conceive and produce the opening event. It employed thousands of actors, and an immense sum of money was spent on production. One can easily guess the numbers considering that the total expense of the games, according to the official announcement, amounted to more than two billion USD, although the exact numbers for the opening and closing events have never been made public.

The campaign for the Olympics event clearly showed the strong desire to connect, and even to integrate, China within the global world. Its goal was obviously to transmit the message of the official authorities, and of a great part of the society: the Olympics was the most important opportunity to show the success of China’s progress towards a modernized and harmonious society that would “peacefully elevate” itself to superpower status. The Chinese shared with others “One World, One Dream.” However, ironically, behind the slogan, it clearly embraced the aesthetics of Disneyland, mixing a cocktail consisting of the plastic structures of socialist political propaganda, folkloric kitsch, and “globalized” commercial advertisement.

Clearly, the Olympics was the best opportunity to stimulate and rally the population to embrace nationalism and patriotism. Indeed, it’s much needed, especially as the current China, which is the most populated country in the world and spans an immense territory of considerably diversified conditions, is going through the most radical but somehow uncertain transition in history. The Olympics, having constructed a narrative of celebration of national success, is therefore elevated to the status of a legend, a momentarily crucial symbol of the renewed identity of a powerful nation. A large part of the population, especially among the rising urban middle class, expressed their enthusiasm in support of the

6 Cai Guo-Qiang, Footprints event. They somehow “suspended” their recently obtained self-awareness of History: Fireworks Project for the Opening Ceremony of of individuality to embrace a kind of national solidarity. the Beijing Olympic Games, August 8, 2008. Photo: Hiro Ihara. Courtesy of Cai Studio, New York. But the Olympics, as well as its host country China, are a global event. There is no way to avoid different voices weighing in about what China is and how it is seen by people from all around the world. Critiques and protests against the highly official image of a harmonious and peaceful society hiding its record of political oppression, execution, etc., were inevitably mounted and followed the very trajectory of the voyage of the “sacred torch” of the Olympics. Many of those manifestations were spectacular and propagated widely by the media. The Olympics, and China itself, are inevitably controversial.

More controversies became apparent when some forgeries in the opening event were discovered; for example, the fifty-six children representing China’s officially sanctioned “ethnic minorities” were all found to be of Han (the dominant ethnic group) origin. The little girl singing the Olympic anthem was actually lip-syncing, while another, “less pretty” girl, was the actual singer hidden behind the scene. What’s even more “scandalous” was that the artist Cai Guo-qiang, a global celebrity who designed the opening’s extraordinary fireworks show, admitted to the press that a part of the program, the twenty-nine fire footprints running through the city and broadcast live on television, was actually a computer simulation.

Indeed, what is certainly more ironic is the fact the opening event took place at exactly 8:00 p.m., 8 minutes and 8 seconds, on the 8th day of the 8th month (August) of the year 2008. This was a decision based on a now popular fetishism with the number 8, which phonetically echoes the word fa, which signifies enriching and developing. This folkloric superstition originated in Hong Kong’s Cantonese culture and was brought to mainland China as a part of its influence on China’s vision of modernization. What is really extraordinary is that, instead of searching for any historic, scientific,

7 or ideological reference, the organizers, with the sanction of the political Cai Guo-Qiang, Fireworks Project for the Opening authorities, resorted to a vulgar and populist craze to justify their choice of Ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, August 8, when to launch China’s most important sportive, cultural, and political event! 2008. Photo: Xinhua. Courtesy of Cai Studio, New York.

Wherever it has taken place, the Olympics has been an urban event that stimulates urban transformation. This time, in Beijing, its role of catalyst of urban mutation was even more evident. All the sportive venues were at the centre of a totally new urban planning. Stars of global architecture were invited to design the most important edifices. Some of the world’s most audacious and extravagant designs were proposed and constructed. Herzog & DeMeuron’s Olympic Stadium, widely known as the Bird’s Nest, is the most remarkable landmark, while a whole set of amazing buildings that include the Water Cube (“the swimming pool,” designed by the Australian architect group PTW Architects) and the Data Centre (designed by Zhu Pei with Urbanus) were erected around it to form an “Olympic Green.”

In fact, since Beijing was designated as the Olympic host city eight years ago, a fervent rush towards urban expansion and construction of new architectural landmarks was launched in order to transform the ancient capital city of one of the largest countries in the world into a veritable global metropolis. After Shenzhen, Shanghai, and, to a lesser extent, , Beijing is now striving to become the largest laboratory for all kinds of design adventures proposed by both Chinese and international architects and urbanists. Large-scale projects of new urban infrastructure, buildings, and renovations have been introduced, often with controversy and debate. More often than not, in spite of the voices of critique and protest, notably from professionals and intellectuals, as well as local inhabitants, the controversies are solved in the way that largely favours political authority and the developers. One of the most notorious cases is the Grand National Theatre commissioned by then-president Jiang Zemin and designed by French airport design specialist Paul Andreu. The choice of a project in

8 the shape of a huge egg, with all kinds of fantastic exploitations of site and materials, and which obviously exceeded the budget, offends the coherence of the urban fabric, abuses natural resources, and causes environmental concerns such as light pollution. Now, in the heart of Beijing, next to the Tian’anmen Square, which had also gone through huge transformations in the late 1950s for the sake of constructing the most significant symbol of New China’s political identity, a new grotesque edifice is the most visible symbol of a new regime that seeks to endow itself with the glory of modernization and success as a global superpower. On the other hand, after the pompous opening of the Grand National Theatre, one suddenly finds that the entrance admission to the building typically costs over one thousand Yuan, which is the whole monthly salary of a worker who built it.

National Theatre, Beijing, 2009, Paul Andreu, architect. Photo: ©Paul Maurer. Courtesy of Paul Andreu.

Bigness has always been an obsession for , probably the most visionary architect of our time. China’s urban expansion, from Shenzhen’s “miraculous” rise from a no-man’s land, to Beijing’s ambition to become the new global centre, has been a crucial source of inspiration for his brave, innovative, and provocative envisioning of the city of the future in the age of globalization. The project by him and his team of Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA; now co-signed by Ole Scheeren and Rem Koolhaas) for the new Chinese Central Television (CCTV) complex, the biggest media organization in the world, is the first major project to be realized in China after Koolhaas dedicated more than a decade of intellectual and strategic engagement with the country’s urban mutation and social change. With the radically innovative intervention of revolutionary proposals to restructure the system of media production, the new CCTV building promises to be not only the first test model for an unprecedented typology of skyscraper, but also a site of change towards a new model of information production in a new century. Its impressive scale and absolute beauty, the result of profound studies of the urban history of the city, the Chinese social system, and critical insights into global urban changes, are really convincing. From here, one can pose the question: is Beijing, along with other major Chinese cities, showing the first step towards a totally new urbanity for the age of globalization? The answer is totally open.

9 10 China Central Television At this point, one can also ask the question: how have all these extravagant, Headquarters (CCTV), 2009, Beijing. Partners in charge: Ole highly experimental, and unevenly successful edifices been accepted, Scheeren and Rem Koolhaas for the Office for Metropolitan approved, and supported by the decision makers, namely political and Architecture, Rotterdam. Courtesy of the Office for urban authorities, developers, and other investors? It’s interesting and Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). instructive to look at one aspect here—how the projects have been presented to those decision-making sectors. Thanks to the progress of computer technologies, especially 3D simulation and animation programs, architects can now turn their professional, highly technical, complicated ideas, concepts, and designs into brilliantly colourful, super-realistic renderings, packaged in the most sophisticated way and perfectly framed by the canon of beauty found in the prevailing consumerist advertising industry. Digital technology is now a key element, and at times it is the most efficient and powerful part of the entire architectural profession. It functions perfectly as a magician whose touch can turn the stone into gold, or a marchand du sable who can make fortunes by selling dreams. Fiction replaces reality, and it makes you believe reality will be like what you see in the fiction. There’s no longer any difference between fiction and the city. This time, the fiction is a perfect narrative of the wonderland of consumerist dreams and capitalist virtues, guarded by the seamless surveillance and control of the totalizing and even totalitarian state, of course, for the common good of the people.

The Beijing-based Crystal Digital Technology Company is the crème de la crème of the industry. Its success is so great that it boasts the unmatchable record of producing simulation images for literally all major new buildings in Beijing, and even throughout China. The marvellously produced, paradisiacal images of the new city and its dreamlike buildings ingeniously echo the fantastic but somehow Disney-like vision of “One World, One Dream.” As long as one does not have a dream different from what is taught by the political big brothers, one can enjoy this heaven, combining the best things in reality and fiction, or the very real fiction, in the happiest way, and be proud of it!

This enjoyment and pride, of course, are not the private property of Beijing and its inhabitants. Actually, they are the common goal and, to a great extent, reality, for those who live outside the capital. Guangzhou, China’s “Southern Gate to the World,” is now catching up with a spectacular urban expansion and Central Business District (CBD) project, ultimately marked by the tallest and brightest TV tower in the world (designed by Arup), easily surpassing Shanghai’s pre-twenty-first century brand maker, the “Oriental Pearl Tower.” As a response to the Beijing Olympics and other attempts by other cities to be number one in urbanization, Shanghai now is intensely preparing for the big show of the 2010 World Expo, themed “Better City, Better Life.” Its spearhead is no doubt the newly released crystal rendering of the Chinese pavilion, and one can hardly imagine any design more “Chinese” than it! Under a reversed pyramid-like big roof, resonating the cliché of a Tang dynasty palace, is going to be another (even more) successful manifesto of China’s success in the world. The Tang dynasty has for a long time been seen as the most glorious epoch in the history of China. Now it’s time to resume this status, and even go further.

11 This desire for reality/fiction is expressed not only in the most spectacular Guangzhou TV Tower. Photo: Zheng Shengtian. events and public edifices. It is also an integral part of the remaking of everyday life in the city today. Next to booming office buildings and shopping malls, urban Chinese are now allowed and encouraged to dream of living in the most advanced modern comfort found in brand new residences, often in the form of gated communities with exotic Western, especially Americanized European names, ranging from Porto Fino and Roman Gardens to Beverly Hills via Gold Coast. The ultimate realm to be reached is called SOHO—which smartly borrows from the trendy New York Soho area, but, according to the developer, actually stands for Small Office, Home Office! You are free to get whatever you want from of it, as long as you pay.

Interestingly, the new development of middle/upper class urban habitats in China has gone through a rapid, quasi-revolutionary transition from embracing the fashion of nostalgic and exotic design such as fake Greek- Roman columns and French Rococo floras, to hyper-Modernist and contemporary Minimalist trends via all sorts of “postmoderns.” Now they are in perfect harmony with the globalized lifestyle. But the sign of success is no longer only owning a large apartment or villa with a high-end brand car. What is now the most frequent topic of urban gossip is the jealous sigh in response to someone who has just collected a good amount of contemporary art and designer furniture.

Life in paradise is not only something that one can read in novels or see in films. It’s real, so real that it’s right next to you.

Resistance To develop these living paradises, one needs land. Chinese cities are in the most theatrical period of expansion and modernization. New construction, however fancy it may be, has to coexist with the old city and all its residue— density, chaos, noise, and the most unpredictable and uncontrollable events. Suddenly, one sees a division of the city: one that is real for those who can

12 afford it but fictive for those who cannot. And the poorer ones are always the majority. For the benefit of the minority who claim to be creating a new and upgraded life for the rest of the population, others are forced to accept the fiction as the reality and to give up the land where generations of their families have lived and laboured. It’s no surprise that the famous Jianwai SOHO in Beijing is eating up the neighbouring land that used to be a popular market place, and the brand new zhujiang xincheng (Pearl River New Town) campus overlooks a huge piece of green area with nobody in it—the urban planning of the area allows, and even encourages, the exclusion of “outsiders” from this supposedly public park. Indeed, it’s a very nice decoration for the eyes of those who can afford to live in the apartment buildings with, as the advertisement says, an “unbeatable river view.”

Jianwai SOHO, Beijing. Photo: Keith Wallace.

Now, it’s time to look into the real nature of the fiction, or fictionalization, of the city. Inevitably, like almost everywhere else in the world, China is going through a painful and complicated process of negotiating between creating a “new urban world” and the gentrification and destruction of a traditional or existing urban fabric. What makes this even more complicated is the reality of all kinds of social transitions happening at the same time, including crucial uncertainty about the political and legal systems that urgently need genuine reform. However, for various reasons those reforms have hardly begun, and economic growth and urban expansion have arrived at such a speed and scale that they can no longer wait. Society, both from the bottom and from the top, can no longer sustain the status quo, and it is in this context that an explosive event happened that attracted huge public attention and debate in the spring of 2007. A bird’s-eye view photo of a

13 small house with a national flag, standing alone in the middle of a huge construction site in Chongqing, was published in hundreds of printed and electronic media, in both China and abroad. The title goes: “the proudest nail family (dingzi hu) in history stays on in Chongqing.” This is a couple who has refused to cede their family house to a major developer for unfair compensation. Under the most difficult conditions, including the cutting of their electricity and water supplies, they stayed on for more than three years. The construction of a large shopping mall had to be postponed. Under the media spotlight, Mr. and Mrs. Wu, the owners of the house, performed spectacular actions of resistance in front of the media to attract public attention. They waved the national flag and presented the official certificate of their ownership issued by the municipal authority along with a copy of the Constitution of the People’s Republic, which claims protection of private property. Public opinion across the country, and even outside the country, was favourably influenced by their bold actions, and they were hailed for their courage to resist with their bare hands those in power.

This event triggered an unstoppable chain reaction that spread across the country. People woke up to discover similar cases of “nail families” in their own cities. Dramatic images of solitary houses, typically standing in the middle of empty land surrounded by new high-rise buildings or temporarily interrupted construction sites, are now regularly published in national and local newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet. Dingzi hu has become one of the trendiest terms in both the media and popular conversation, demonstrating an urgent concern shared widely among the population and revealing some of the most fundamental problems faced today by society: the legal status of private property, the social division caused by gentrification, and the self-awareness and resistance of grassroots social groups facing the oppressive invasion of their everyday life by those in power, namely the government, investors, and developers. Ultimately, this lays bare the fact that profound social injustices are happening frequently across the country in the most radical transition in China’s history. Obviously, the demand for civil rights from the bottom of society is no longer stoppable. And the government now has had to respond with some concrete solutions. After numerous heated debates and protests, the Chinese parliament finally passed a new law to recognize the legal status of private property in October 2007. This gesture is largely considered a turning point in China’s political reform since it shows, cautiously, a new direction in the evolution of the social system towards a kind of hybrid between state control and societal democracy, between collective identity and individual freedom—although this is in contradiction to the most fundamental principles of the Constitution, which insist on the state, the abstract representative of the “people,” as the unique property owner. China’s modernization over the last decades is now facing a most challenging momentum. The building of a dreamlike urban fiction has to go through a painful but inevitable reality check.

These exciting events naturally stimulate public imagination. Hundreds of artworks, often in the form of caricature, have been published in printed media and on the Internet. They manifest vivid and free imagination and expression, as well as a great sense of humour, from the sector of society with the strongest desire for political reform.

14 This also provides the best opportunity for contemporary artists, after largely benefiting from the market boom during the last few years, to reconsider the necessary question of social engagement. Now, some of the burgeoning artists are brought back to the conflictive social and political reality. Zhao Bandi, a.k.a. Pandaman, who has been known for using his avatar Panda to satirize social problems, designed costumes for various media figures and mounted a Panda fashion show. The figures of dingzi hu are the most spectacular ones and the true protagonists.

Jiang Zhi, Things would turn Jiang Zhi, an artist and cultural critic with rich experience in the media nails once they happened, 2007, C-print, 150 x 200 cm. world, celebrates the event of the Chongqing dingzi hu by transforming Courtesy of the artist. the news photograph into an angelic dreamland, with elegant and quasi spiritual lights shining over the lonely house of Mr. and Mrs. Wu. The violence of urban gentrification has often resulted in superficial urban upgrading that ignores and even sacrifices the livelihood of ordinary citizens and the city’s natural evolution. The “retro-transformation” of the Dazhalan area to the south of Tian’anmen Square as a part of the Olympic urban development program is a typical case. For hundreds of years, this area was Beijing’s main commercial centre, with all kinds of small business and traditional activities ranging from craftwork, food markets, teahouses, and Beijing opera to prostitution. It was a busy and prosperous hutong area with a high-density population. A unique local grassroots culture was developed there over centuries and became a remarkable representation of Beijing’s cultural characteristics. In the 1990s, along with the shifting of Beijing’s new central business district (CBD) to the east side of the city and the endless expansions of urban zones marked by the construction of six ring roads, interest in this old centre was suddenly abandoned. Investments

15 were no longer available there, and developers and policy makers were no longer interested in renovation or construction. The whole district quickly regressed to become a veritable slum. In 2004, as part of planning for the approaching of the Olympics, the city government and planning authorities decided to turn this district into a new tourist destination by reconstructing the pre-revolution look of the area in order to show to global tourists an “authentic Beijing-ness.” This transformation, instead of providing any improvement for the living conditions of the local inhabitants, was carried out in a systematically tabula rasa manner. The original houses and streets, often in bad condition, were totally erased and replaced by a Disney-like theme park “replica” of an imagined “old Dazhalan.” While the newcomers to the area are tourists and service businesses, the original inhabitants were sent to the outskirts of the city.

This process of gentrification caused a great deal of controversy and resulted in grassroots resistance by the local inhabitants. In the meantime, artists and intellectuals used this dramatic event as a site of research and intervention in order to critically examine the urgent issue of today’s urban and social transition. The most remarkable example is the Dazhalan project, led by Ou Ning, Cao Fei, and their colleagues of Alternative Archive, in the framework of Beijing Case organized by the German Kulturstiftung and the Goethe Institut. For this project, they spent more than a year researching and documenting the process of the demolition of the old district. They produced a large number of photographs, video, interviews, and other materials to illustrate the process of this formidable transformation and the reaction of the population. These voices and images, which transgress officially sanctioned or censured boundaries of information and expression, are powerful testimonies of a particularly significant moment in China’s history of modernization. In the meantime, the artists’ actions and products have clearly manifested the necessity and power of artistic and intellectual intervention in social reality. The most significant and efficient part of the project is certainly the film Meishi Street, based on the story of Zhang Jinli, an ordinary inhabitant who had carried out courageous and insistent acts of resistance against the violation of the authorities and demolition crews. He set up a kind of mise-en-scène with slogan banners and national flags around his little restaurant, where he also lived, requesting fair treatment of his case. Also, having learned how to use a video camera, he recorded the demolition, using the video camera as a kind of weapon and often managing to stop the process of demolition. The authorities and demolition crews felt threatened by the documenting of their unfair and violent actions. According to Ou Ning, although Zhang Jinli’s house was eventually taken down, his firm conviction about his own rights and his audacious actions have already demonstrated a new model of resistance and negotiation that thrives in the grassroots movements, whose participants are the very victims of Beijing’s explosive urban mutation.

To understand the history of China’s urban expansion and its contradictions, as well as the making of illusive, fictional, urban visions for the future, it’s necessary to look into the deeper causes. Indeed, many professionals and intellectuals as well as artists have done wonderful work in this direction.

16 Left: Ou Ning, Cao Fei, Dazhalan Project, 2008, photo documentation. Courtesy of Ou Ning. Right: Ou Ning, Cao Fei, Meishi Street, 2008, film. Courtesy of Ou Ning.

One of the most well-known personalities is the journalist and urban critic Wang Jun. In his bestseller Chengji (“City Records,” also translated as “an evolutionary history of the city of Beijing”) and other writings including his new book Caifangben shang de Chenshi (“City on the Notebook”), he has studied and analyzed with acutely critical insights the causes of Beijing’s urban transformation during the last century. His re-examination of the destruction of the old city prompted by the socialist revolutionary ideology and its radical form of achieving modernity, with all its controversies and political and human dramas, leads us to understand the fundamental problem of the practice of urban gentrification, destruction, and conflict from the perspective of the legal status of property rights. He argues that due to the transference of private property rights to collective ownership, namely state ownership, urban inhabitants have lost both their responsibilities and their capacities to protect their homes. Hence, the State’s interests were for a long time focused on the production of highly politicized “public spaces” based on a Soviet-style modernist vision and logic instead of maintaining and improving ordinary, given conditions such as those found in the older hutong. The old city has therefore been destroyed. In Beijing, old city walls, gates, and hutong were taken down to make room for new infrastructures of automobile transportation systems, factories, and collective habitations. The remaining traditional districts were in a deplorable state of decay. Today, it would be much too expensive to renovate a traditional area even if it is a site of invaluable cultural heritage. When the new wave of urban development came, the authorities and developers simply opted to erase the historic areas and replace them with more profitable high-rise buildings and large- scale infrastructure. Sacrificing “old forms” of urban life and street-level communication, new and highly hygienic, even sterile, urban constructions are now being promoted.

But, in fact, China’s fast-expanding cities are far from the paradisiacal land of promise based on the fictions of super-planning. Instead, in most cases, expansions took place in a chaotic manner to meet the short-sighted needs of development and profit making. They are the result of “post-planning” situations: driven by political and economic interests, most construction in many cities actually happened before any urban plan had been made. Most of the urban planning, if it exists at all, seeks to fill in the gaps and repair the mistakes made by these uncontrolled developments. Planning according to this model is by nature a posterior act. Interestingly, it is through intense and chaotic negotiations with such post-planning realities that cities can still maintain and improve their vivacity and energy. Social, political,

17 economic, and cultural differences, ambivalences, and conflicts are often the best way to provoke new imaginations and solutions to various problems. The coexistence of the desire to realize ideal urban plans based on fictional scripts and the reality of post-planning practice together form a perfect couple constantly quarrelling about their future.

Due to the double-bind system of separation between urban and rural populations in terms of their property status designed by the communist authorities in the early years of the People’s Republic, the land in the city and countryside enjoy totally different treatment and are administrated separately. The urban population could not own land at all, while farmers could collectively own and use their land under the framework of People’s Communes and then villages. When the cities expanded rapidly, beginning in the 1980s, farmers had to sell their land to the urban authorities. But their status as farmers could by no means be transferred to that of urban citizens. Therefore, many cities are confronted with a new phenomenon: villages in the city (chengzhongcun), often villages for farmers who have lost the land they used for agricultural production. To make their living, typically, these farmers built new housing to rent to new migrant workers (mingong) and other “floating populations (liudong renkou).” This type of housing, due to the lack of land and the builders’ amateur skills, is often built informally and not in accordance with basic urban regulations. Surrounded by new urban zones, it is extremely dense and badly equipped, and all kinds of activities, including underground industries and illegal practices such as prostitution and drug dealing, have developed there. The urban authorities usually don’t have the power to intervene, since these areas remain “villages.” They are no-man’s lands in the municipal legal system. At the same time, it’s because of the need to respond to urgent problems that many inventive solutions have been devised in self- organizational ways by the “villagers,” including some extremely lively and extraordinary architectural forms and alternative ways of life. “Villages in the city” are now laboratories for the new possibilities of urban life.

The phenomenon of “villages in the city” has also become one of the most frequently discussed topics in both professional and popular media in debates about urbanization. The phenomenon is also increasingly included in the agenda of various municipal governments as a priority for urban problem solving. In Guangzhou, there have been more than one hundred and forty villages counted in the city. Similar numbers can be found in Shenzhen and other major cities. These villages provide perfect sites for artists and their intellectual friends to exercise their interests in researching, witnessing, and expressing the drastic transition of society. In 2003, commissioned by the project “Z.O.U.—zone of urgency” as a part of the 50th , Ou Ning, Cao Fei, and their cinéphile group U-theque chose to develop their project in San Yuan Li, the most famous village in the city of Guangzhou. Inspired by the Russian avant-garde film director Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Camera (1929), they spent six months roaming through the village—which is situated next to the city’s airport and famous for its resistance against the British colonial armed force in the nineteenth- century Opium War—and recorded the most unlikely views of the exciting

18 Ou Ning, Cao Fei, U-teque, street corners, buildings, and people. They produced a wonderful black- stills from the filmSan Yuan Li, 2003. Courtesy of Ou Ning. and-white film carrying the name of the village. The intense combination of moving images, often poetic and even romantic, with the most unexpected scenes of alternative life and people, renders the film highly attractive. What is most successful here is that they manage to transmit the quasi-hedonistic and optimistic mood of the inhabitants who explore the energy, vivacity, and possibilities emerging from this unknown world that is so opposite to the formal city. The public is invited to share the same energy, vivacity, and innovative possibilities.

What is important about these “informal” self-organized realities is not only to acknowledge the energy and excitement, but also the unique and innovative ways in which it is possible to see, read, categorize, and live the “alternative” city space and life. These help us to look at fast-mutating urban society beyond the conventional and established intellectual and political frameworks. Some of the urban researchers in China are now beginning to develop their own, singular ways of probing into the city and related issues. The magazine Urban China, founded in 2004 by Jiang Jun and his friends,

19 is an outstanding example of inventive ways to study and mediate the city and its challenges. Dealing with the most diverse issues related to urban culture, from urban theory to sociology, from everyday objects to history, from architecture to art, and from media to politics, it introduced some of the most sensitive and meaningful debates on the reality of Chinese cities of various regions and backgrounds, far beyond the spectacular metropolis and theoretical clichés. On the other hand, the style of design and language in the magazine avoids hermetic academicism to embrace the taste of the rising middle class, especially that of urban youth. No doubt, that youth is considered by the editors as the most hopeful force in the making of the future of Chinese cities.

The unprecedented speed, scale, and process of Chinese urbanization, as a radical case of globalization, certainly exert influence and impact beyond its borders. Parallel to the participation of foreign architects of different degrees of reputation in the new construction, more and more professionals are settling in China to conduct research projects in order to produce new theories and strategies of urbanization. After the now-classic Harvard Chinese City Projects on the Pearl River Delta led by Rem Koolhaas in the 1990s, a younger generation of researchers is now expanding studies in China. One of the recent examples is the Dynamic City group, directed by the young Dutch architect Neville Mars. Their recent book, The Chinese Dream—A Society Under Construction, attempts to provide a comprehensive study of the different aspects of Chinese urban society. The group also produces conceptual projects of urban transformation for Chinese cities.

Next to the artists and social activists, some architects and urbanists of a younger generation are also fascinated by the complex and challenging reality of “informal” urban expansion represented by the villages in the city. Embracing this “alternative” situation as a given condition that can provoke creative ideas and solutions for architectural and urban design, they are trying to develop ground-breaking concepts and forms of design incorporating these given conditions. This may seem totally strange and even dissident in the eyes of the mainstream professionals in China who have followed the Soviet modernist approach and the official line of urban policy that favours totalizing solutions such as tabula rasa and gentrification. The Shenzhen-based architecture firm Urbanus, founded by four young architects who returned from the U.S. after completing their studies there in the late 1990s, is probably the most active group in this direction. Their research and practice in creating improvements for Shenzhen’s “problematic” urban zones, notably the numerous villages in the city, are particularly significant. Instead of erasing the “malfunctioning,” informal buildings that have already formed a lively and organic urban fabric, as the authorities and developers plan to do, they propose to intensify the existing conditions with inventive proposals such as adding new and ecologically friendly structures to improve the situation. As a result, a totally novel typology of urban and architectural design is being given birth.

20 Moreover, the phenomenon of villages in the city has also become an attractive topic for professionals from abroad. The Dutch architectural school Berlage Institute sent professors and students to Guangzhou and Shenzhen to study the situation. They too proposed improvement projects to integrate into the existing conditions.

In the end, the question of urban expansion in today’s China is one of how to invent and develop a relevant model of modernization, with new modes of production, from industry to agriculture, urban space to social relationships, the economic system to the political system. The most intense zones of urbanization are also the most active zones for this experiment. The Pearl River Delta (PRD), covering approximately five hundred kilometres from Hong Kong to Macau via Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Zhuhai, is the most active laboratory for this great test. For the past three decades, the whole zone has been largely urbanized and covered with new factories and cities. Becoming the largest production base for the global economy and gaining the title of “World Factory,” the PRD is now designated as a city-region. It manifests a totally new type of urbanity. While political decisions, international investments, and technologic progress play decisive roles in the process, one should not ignore a key but often “invisible” element: migrant workers. Since the 1990s, millions of peasants left the remote countryside and rushed into the urbanized industrial areas to look for jobs in the new factories and in other service job markets. A majority of them, from the inland regions, found themselves in the PRD area. Their displacement has contributed significantly to the making of China’s most dynamic and productive zone of modernization. This immense human force has also transformed the urban structures with unique, often “informal,” and emergent solutions. The Hong Kong-based, French architecture and research firm known as Map Office (Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix) has conducted studies on the phenomenon. These kinds of studies have not only provided valuable, first-hand materials for the profession, but have also directly celebrated the glorious contribution of this new labour force.

The living and working conditions of the migrant workers, their rights and claims, and their future are largely ignored by the urban population yet have increasingly become the focus of social debates over the last few years. This new attention is often the result of the tragic experiences of the migrant workers in their protests against injustice and maltreatments. Their lives and destiny have gradually become an important subject matter for literature, media, and art, as well as sociological studies. Documentary films are widely used to carry out the task of representing this phenomenon. The Guangzhou-based journalists and filmmakers Zhou Hao and Ji Jianghong spent 2003 investigating and recording the lives of the migrant workers in the township of Houjie, a major industrial zone in the Dongguan area. With its moving narrative, Zhou’s and Ji’s documentary film Houjie Township (2002) shows the living reality of this particular social group. The film’s intensity and emotion has mobilized great public attention and concern.

21 Xu Tan, The Wine for 9 September, 2005, installation for the 2nd Guangzhou Triennale. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

Artist Zhu Jia’s installation The Heart-Burnt Carrot (2005), reproducing the typical small dormitory of a migrant worker, is another remarkable example of concern for migrant workers on the part of the contemporary art community. The mise-en-scène of a temporary dwelling, chaotic and full of dirt, with family photos recalling workers’ longing for families in the remote countryside, shows the conditions of life for those who struggle physically and psychologically to survive the hard times of social and economic transition. These anonymous hard workers are the ones who have produced the most important part of China’s modernization and urban development.

In spite of their hard work and important contributions, the migrant workers can hardly afford any urban entertainment or cultural life. Karaoke, one of the most popular forms of entertainment for urban middle class, is never open to those who helped that class become enriched. Xu Tan, an active social critic and multimedia artist, decided to construct a karaoke room for the migrant workers as his project for the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial in 2005. Situated outside the museum and constructed in the form of a typical shopping and luggage bag for migrant workers without permits from the urban authorities, this “illegal” but easy-to-access karaoke room was open twenty-four hours a day to the migrant workers whose legal status and visibility in the city was as ambiguous and contradictory as the structure itself. The “cheap” look of the structure makes you laugh. But the experience inside can make you think deeply.

Li Yifan is a documentary filmmaker and photographer who is famous for films such as Before the Flood, which depicts scenes of displacement of the local populations in Sichuan’s Three Gorges region before the destruction of the old cities to make way for the largest reservoir in the world. Village Archive, Li Yifan’s film that records the underground church activities in a remote countryside area, also expresses deep concern with the destiny of migrant workers and other powerless people in today’s China. In his recent exhibition (with Zhang Xiaotao) at Beijing’s Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, he produced a performative and interactive installation, Dossier, that displayed a collection of dossiers of lawsuits in defense of the rights of migrant workers. Using some in-site interviews with the actual

22 Li Yifan, Dossier, 2008, installation. Courtesy of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

workers and the lawyers representing them, the artist demonstrated their claims for justice.

Cao Fei, a young rising international art star, intervened in the world of the migrant workers in an even more active and engaging manner. Commissioned by the Siemens Arts Programme, she spent months in a Foshan-based factory that produces light bulbs for the global firm Osram. While researching factory life and engaging in dialogues with the workers, she organized cultural activities for the workers and helped them to turn themselves into temporary artists and utopian dreamers. She proposed to transform the factory’s motto (”More success with total productive maintenance”) from a production-centric one into one of humanism and solidarity (“More fun with team, people, motivation”) and turned the workplace into a fun park. She reversed the established hierarchy in the organization of the factory for a new social order. This was a temporary utopia. It was fragile. A utopian moment inevitably implies the ultimate destruction of utopia itself. When the question “whose utopia” is posed, a real crisis of this newly obtained identity is exposed. Utopia ended up being a broken dream and empty promise when everyone came back to the reality of everyday labour after short moments of euphoria and “liberation” of the self. Utopia became dystopia. Nevertheless, this project was not meant to relieve the workers from sadness and help them embrace nostalgia. Instead, it was about what reality is and the need to negotiate with it by means of collective intelligence and collaboration.

Cao Fei is a versatile talent who has always based her artwork on the interaction and incorporation of multiple disciplines, media, and forms of expression. Producing theatrical spectacles is her speciality. For the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial, working with a team of young actors, artists, musicians, and other volunteers, she created a wonderful musical theatre piece, PRD Anti-Heroes. Appropriating the format of a beauty contest on TV shows, she used a form of communication and entertainment familiar to the working class to reveal the comic and ironic dark sides of society in the process of “internal globalization” and urbanization, and pointed to its moral, economic, and political corruption. PRD Anti-Heroes lays bare the

23 24 Above: Jin Jiangbo, The very fact that the world itself is dominated by the greed of global capitalism. Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene (Production In addition, she “celebrates” resistance by the lower rungs of society, from workshop of a foreign capital television manufacturing those “unqualified” and “alternative” anti-heroes. She eventually brings us to enterprise), 2008, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. question the validity of the established social hierarchies, values, and justice, Opposite top: Cao Fei, Whose and, hence, the meaning of the relationship between people and historicity, Utopia, 2006, video, 20 mins. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative a core issue of the power system itself. Space, Guangzhou. Opposite Bottom: Cao Fei, PRD Anti-Heroes, 2005, For the last two years, the PRD area has been confronted with a serious performance, 90 mins., at the 2nd Guangzhou Triennale. crisis for the first time after years of booming growth. The factories are Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. facing the challenges of technological upgrading, the rise of labour costs, enforcement of regulation, and competition from other parts of the country and neighbouring nations, as well as price increases for primary materials. This has been worsened by the imposition of new labour protection laws recently passed in the Chinese legislature. Many migrant workers are leaving the region, forcing factories and services to close down; the optimistic urban boom seems to be coming to an end, and new visions and strategies for developing a more sustainable and technologically advanced urban world are badly needed.

Jin Jiangbo, a savvy new media artist who is highly sensitive to the evolution of the computer industry and other technology-oriented production sites, visited the region recently to record abandoned factories. Using the camera as a “weapon,” Jin Jiangbo ventured into the empty, ruin-like workshops that were the busiest production sites for the world economy until recent months, and there he memorialized scenes of desolation, loss, and decay. The artist states:

[These works] represent my view of the craziness and spuriousness of the deceptive commodity economy. They are also a portrayal of the impending crisis facing China’s economy, which is in the process of becoming a bubble. The market’s “cause” of many years led to the “effect” of the declining economy today that appears in my photographs. I see a China aspiring to prominence, faced with developments and transformation in the business and industry sectors, striving for new directions in strategic economic breakthrough. In the midst of such violent economic structural readjustments, a tragic and scarred economy is inevitably created. This is my Great Economic Retreat: the Dongguan Scene.1

In the end, when the illusory promise of a dreamland city collapses, the dream seller, or the marchand du sable, also has to pay the price. A few years ago, one of the most spectacular suicidal incidents happened in Guangzhou.

25 In front of a TV camera, a developer who ran out of money jumped from a half-built skyscraper. This immediately became a “legendary” episode in Chinese urban fiction, another hot topic in urban gossip. With a stunning video animation, the artist Huang Xiaopeng, obsessed with British music after many years living in London, reminded us that this story became a part of the collective consciousness of the inhabitants of Guangzhou. The title of Huang Xiaopeng’s work is I always get a bit jumpy when I’m suspended in the air, is borrowed from a famous sixteenth-century English song “O Death, Rock Me Asleep.” According to the artist:

The words in “O Death, Rock Me Asleep” have often been identified as the lament of Anne Boleyn imprisoned in the Tower of London—perhaps authored by herself or by her brother George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford—but the several manuscript sources are all anonymous. The musical setting, also anonymous, is extraordinary for its period in the persistent reiteration of the tolling death-knell in the bass. . . . Somehow, it always reminds me of the ancient sound of nan yin [a genre of Cantonese folk song]. The bizarre encounter between a tragic suicidal event and a spiritual song, and the unexpected encounter between two fallen celebrities separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles, render the scene strangely emotional but with a dose of humour. 1

No doubt, spectacular urban projects for the Olympics, like CBDs in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and so on, are propaganda for the new utopia of a modernized China, the imaginary fiction of those in power— political authorities, financial and economic enterprises, tycoons, etc. They are dreaming to make this fiction come true at any price. This is the “One World” of the powerful, of the champions in the game of making a new global monster, of those who share “One Dream” that is the pleasure of owning money and holding power. Driven by this dream of utopia, and in spite of all kinds of contradictions and conflicts, it is undeniable that China’s economy and social life have gone through a booming progress, and most people have benefited in some way from this transformation.

With no exception, the art and culture worlds are a part of this utopia. Obviously, the contemporary art scene in China is among the most profitable anywhere. Often initiated by the art world itself and later sanctioned and even sponsored by the government, many new art and culture infrastructures have been put into place across the country, especially in major cities, which compete with each other to become the most advanced and attractive cultural and tourist destination. International investments also flood in, speculating on China’s future as the new powerhouse of art production and consumption. Beijing’s 798 art complex and Shanghai’s Moganshan art complexes are famous, and they have been officially included in the cities’ tourist guides. The opening of Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in 798 is the highlight of the Beijing art and culture fever, while the recently opened Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in a building designed by Arata Isozaki, is the latest pride of the art community.

26 Opening of Ullens Centre But the challenge to the art world is: should art still be a critical voice in for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2007. Photo: Keith society? How can artists engage with social causes? What is a meaningful Wallace. way for them to express their personal pursuits of liberty of imagination and expression? In other words, how can artists critically engage with the new reality, the new urban world, prompted by the vision and implementation of the official utopia, without falling into superficial tokenism or moralist pedagogy? Many artists, navigating and negotiating between this reality of the official grandeur and their personal wills, come up with singular, diverse, and imaginary structures of formal expression, namely personal microcosms or individual, non-official utopias. These “other” utopias act as bridges to connect the larger, collective, and established projects of the official utopia with the products of personal independence that provide the resources of insight, criticality, and wit. These minor, individual, and unique utopias, constantly evolving with the continuous repositioning of personal perspectives of the artists as they face the changing outside reality, are at once realistic and far-reaching towards the future. Different from the above-mentioned activist interventions that resort to documentary and other forms of testimony, these “smaller” utopian actions are often full of humour, provocation, and extraordinary propositions that point towards new imaginings and ideas, targeting both reality and the self as a part of social intersubjectivity. They are realizable and have to be realized because they are the very raison d’être of the artists’ work itself. At the same time, being highly differentiated, distinctive, and diverse, they form an artistic, cultural, intellectual, and social multitude to counterbalance the hegemony of the official utopia. It is in this very dialectical tension and negotiation that a great deal of contemporary art in China today can still maintain and continue as a force of social critique and of proposition for the social good while artists, as well as intellectuals, can redefine and reinvent their social roles and provide new platforms for the participation of the public in the necessary, often urgent, debates about the evolution of society itself.

In the climax of the overwhelming fever of the Olympics, numerous artists have expressed suspicious, doubtful, and critical views in their works and speeches. One of the most remarkably exciting, provocative, and inspiring projects is the Xijing Olympics by the Xijing Men group, a collaborative collective founded by Chen Shaoxiong from China, Tsuyoshi Ozawa from Japan, and Gimhongsok from Korea, all three well known for their pungency and humour as critical artists vis-à-vis their own contexts and for their openness to transnational collaboration. In their long-term

27 collaborative project Xijing Men, they created a series of multimedia events and presentations documenting an anthropological, historical, and archaeological inquiry into a fictional city called “Xijing, or the Western Capital” as a kind of mocking of Dongjing, or Tokyo, the Eastern Capital, and Beijing, the Northern Capital, the two centres of national power in Japan and China. Expressing their common critical attitudes against the official ideology and policy of identity that always imposes a frozen concept of nationality based on the officially sanctioned version of history of relationship between the neighbouring nations, their collaboration shows a total refusal of this imposition of “historicity,” or the presumed inevitability of the rival relationship between both nations in history. This time, taking the Beijing Olympics as the ultimate propaganda of the official utopia, they came up with a micro, private, and useless Xijing Olympics, which consisted of absurd, black-humour competitions performed in studios, exhibition spaces, homes, and the Internet, as a counter manifestation facing the extravaganza of the official fiction.

Cao Fei, RMB CITY: A Second Life City Plan, 2009, Internet project. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

Living in a Chinese city today, it’s impossible to escape and become isolated from the fervent heat wave of the production of urban fiction. The best way to deal with it, or to negotiate a space of personal freedom within it, is perhaps to appropriate it as a given condition and exaggeratedly utilize it to an excessive degree, exposing its excess and even absurdity to the public gaze. Cao Fei’s RMB City project (www.rmbcity.com), happening in the virtual reality realm of Second Life and physically connected to a businesslike presentation setting in the “First Life,” is no doubt the most radical gesture to fully explore, exhaust, and even further deconstruct the notion of fiction itself. Adopting the business model of the online game Second Life, she creates and sells her own version of the urban fiction, built in an excessively condensed and exaggerated way, to surpass the official fiction. Extending her first step of experimenting with the Second Life as space for global exchange, communication, and collaboration between individuals, as well as the transformation of the artist’s identity, Cao Fei adopted the new identity of China Tracy, which was realized in her project for the Chinese Pavilion in the 2007 Venice Biennale; she came up with an ongoing RMB City for the 10th Istanbul Biennial a few months later. She assembles iconic Chinese architectural landmarks to create a new Chinatown in the virtual world of Second Life and invites the public, including art collectors, to invest in its expansion, like in the real estate business in First Life. This fantastic, hybrid urban world, brilliantly and humorously melding together all kinds of kitsch, exotic, and fancy designs, forms a veritable utopia that can satisfy the

28 most extravagant and spectacular desires of the investors and that ironically reflects the image and the actual process of the making of the official utopia. It becomes a testing ground for all kinds of intentions by those who are involved with the adventure.

Zheng Guogu, Empire, 2008, Living in Yangjiang, a “second video still. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. tier” city in the province of Guangdong, Zheng Guogu, a genuine multitasking provocateur, and his friends in the Yangjiang Group, have enjoyed the absolute freedom offered by this city in an endless and uncontrolled transition from an agricultural township to a modern industrial and trading urban city. Profiting from the ambiguity of regulation and ideological emptiness that prevails in most of the country located outside of the main political centres, they entirely liberate their creativity to carry out outrageous and inventive actions as their artistic production. Their now-famous installations and performances offered chaotic and exciting solutions to challenging questions such as the relationship between high and low art, the elitist and the popular, criticality and playfulness, tradition and modernity, urbanity and ruralness, globalism and the vernacular. They have now come up with an incredibly audacious and provocative project, Age of Empires (2008), an immense, ongoing private colony in the outskirts of the city on a large piece of land that the artist purchased from farmers. Without any official permission, Zheng Guogu, inspired by the online war game Age of Empire, is designing and constructing a whole complex of experimental buildings to create a physically tangible and useful utopia, a personal empire. The fact that this project is being carried out with complicated negotiations regarding its legality, and that it unfolds and evolves over a long period of time towards an uncertain future, is particularly interesting.

Eventually, today, in the age of great transition, the state power of contemporary China is making all efforts to impose and maintain its control through promoting a spectacular but profoundly ambivalent urban fiction of a “modernized” society, or a new, post- and pro-capitalist utopia. Artists living in such a context have to struggle with their own contradictory state of being, at once benefiting from the material progress and suffering from the reduction of critical social engagement. They now have to come up with their own versions of utopia that can continuously allow them to maintain a real reason for the existence of their artistic endeavours. Zheng Guogu’s project, among others, stands as a permanent checking mechanism that challenges the Chinese legal, social, economic, cultural, and political systems, shows a significant example of such an endless struggle. China is going through a radical massive change. And contemporary art activity, as shown in this extraordinary project, has to turn itself into a permanent and open laboratory to negotiate with massive change.

Notes 1 Jin Jiangbo, Retreat, 2008, self-published catalogue, 9. 2 Huang Xiaopeng’s statement on the work. (unpublished).

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