Dancing in the Postsocialist City

Three-fourths of the way into Cao Fei’s Reference Fei, Huber and Chuan2013 video ö² (Haze and Fog), set in a gray high-rise apartment complex in Beijing, a homemaker stands in her upscale kitchen, slowly chopping carrots. Her eyes are glazed over and her movement is languid, until with a swing of the cleaver and a splat of blood, she lops off her own finger. She looks down, slightly surprised, but otherwise her body seems to register no pain. Earlier in the video, a very different scene unfolds: the same woman dances to dramatic tango music up and down the aisle of a supermarket, playfully converting the quotidian movements of grocery shopping into expressive choreography. These two moments, both involving conspicuously corporeal events (dancing and finger-chopping), showcase starkly different relationships between an individual body and its environment: numb dissociation on the one hand, and exuberant attachment on the other. In the latter case, it is the act of dancing that reorients and revives the character’s relationship to her surroundings. As such, the supermarket tango in Haze and Fog epitomizes Cao’s enduring interest in the dancing body as a vehicle for spatial intervention and transformation in postsocialist China.

Figure 2.

Cao Fei, still from Haze and Fog, 2013. Single channel HD video, 16:9, color with sound, 46 min. 30 sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers)

Cao Fei emerged in the mid-1990s as a leading figure in what art historian Wu Hung calls the “‘third generation’ of video and new media artists” in contemporary China (Wu 2014:428). This new generation, born in the 1970s with little to no living memory of the socialist era, was preoccupied less with the legacy of Mao and more with the stark new environment brought about by Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening (gaige kaifang) economic policies of 1978. While existing scholarship focuses narrowly on Cao’s future-oriented explorations of the digital, technologized, and disembodied aspects of China’s urban transformations, a countercurrent runs through Cao’s oeuvre, reflected in her sustained engagement with dance.

Examining the function of dance across Cao’s exploration of postsocialist Chinese urban space sheds light on a crucial yet understudied aspect of her work—what I call Cao’s “choreopolitical aesthetic.”Footnote ¹ This reading relates dance in Cao’s art to Andre Lepecki’s concept of “choreopolitics”: “a redistribution and reinvention of bodies, affects, and senses through which one may learn how to move politically, how to invent, activate, seek, or experiment with a movement whose only sense (meaning and direction) is the experimental exercise of freedom” (2013:21). The choreopolitical function of dance in Cao’s work—that is, dance as a movement of freedom that disrupts an existing spatial and political paradigm—is a dimension of her aesthetic that has largely been eclipsed by Cao’s more conspicuous preoccupations with digital media and virtual space.

Curatorial, critical, and scholarly narratives about Cao’s work have largely focused on Cao’s use of new technologies to explore China’s urban spatial upheavals, often taking the four-year long project RMB City (2008–2011) to be her career-defining work. As such, these dominant accounts overlook Cao’s equally persistent interest in embodiment and performance.

Tracing the significance of dance across Cao’s work begins to correct this blind spot by focusing on three video works that most potently use dance to engage with the postsocialist Chinese city:

公共空间： 给我一个吻 (Public Space—Give Me A Kiss; 2002), 嘻哈： 广州 (Hip Hop: Guangzhou; 2003), and 霾 (Haze and Fog; 2013). Three overlapping contexts figure prominently in these works: the popular culture and spatial politics of reform-era China; site-specific performance in contemporary Chinese art; and theories of dance and politics in performance studies more broadly. Cao’s choreopolitical aesthetic makes use of dance as a source of agency as well as a vehicle for urban disruption, transformation, and fantasy.

Blind Spots, or Cao Fei Beyond Technologized Urban Futurity

Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reform and opening policies signaled not only a new era of free market economics, but also a new era of architectural space in China. In the decades that followed, the country’s transition to a market economy and openness to foreign investments resulted in the large-scale demolition of decades-old city buildings and landmarks, and the frenetic construction of new spaces conducive to late capitalist labor and consumption. In “On Be(ij)ing in the World: ‘Postmodernism,’ ‘Globalization,’ and the Making of Transnational Space in China,” Anthony D. King and Abidin Kusno trace the rise of what they call “transnational space” in Beijing and Shanghai since the 1990s, and describe the transplant to urban China of Euro-American architectural structures such as the skyscraper office tower, the luxury apartment complex, and the suburban villa (2000:43).

These new urban structures erased previous traces of local culture and history, and their attendant logic of commodification, globalization, and dematerialization made it increasingly difficult for local residents to stake any claim in their surrounding space. Housing, previously distributed and subsidized by the state, now became a market commodity, imbuing physical sites with abstract financial and global value.

Futuristic buildings designed by international star architects sprouted up along city skylines, reducing the function of architecture from lived space to visual icon.Footnote ² At the same time, new technologies such as digital video and the internet also gave rise to novel sites of leisure such as the internet café and the Karaoke Television (KTV) bar, as well as to virtual worlds that enabled users to transcend physical and geographical boundaries. The result was a screen-saturated, technologized city environment that melded the real and the simulated, physical and virtual space.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the unprecedented pace and scale of China’s urbanization, when both the size and number of cities increased, became a central subject in contemporary Chinese art. Young artists, many based in globalizing metropolises such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, experimented with new art forms such as multimedia installation and site-specific performance in order to grapple with the disorienting experience of familiar neighborhoods disappearing and transforming seemingly overnight. In 2002, curator Zhang Zhaohui termed this development “new urbanism,” writing: “for young artists who grew up alongside China’s economic reforms and urbanization, the metropolis is not only the stage for their artistic practice, but also their existential background” (2002:45). Similarly, in her 2015 book, art historian Meiqin Wang calls urbanization “the primary condition of art making [in China] in the first decade of the twenty-first century” (2015:17).

From early on, curators and critics recognized Cao Fei as a representative figure of this urban turn in contemporary Chinese art. Having grown up in 1980s Guangzhou, a city in the Pearl River Delta then at the forefront of China’s market reform and opening, Cao experienced firsthand the convulsive changes that rendered China’s urban life unrecognizable. She also spent her formative years immersed in the influx of pop culture and new media that poured in from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the West (such as MTV, Hollywood, and US American television)—influences that would later show up in her art (Cao 2009).

In 2002, Cao was featured in Zhang Zhaohui’s New Urbanism exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art alongside more established artists such as Zhang Huan, Zhan Wang, and the Big Tail Elephant Working Group. Even before then, when Cao was still in college in 1999, her work caught the attention of Paris-based curator Hou Hanru when Cao’s teacher mailed a copy of her student film Imbalance 257 to Hou (Kino Reference Kino2011). At the time, Hou was organizing the traveling exhibition Cities on the Move—Contemporary Asian Art in the Turn of the 21st Century, a sprawling survey of art centered on issues of globalization, urbanism, and hyperdevelopment in Asian cities. Hou shared Cao’s work with the exhibition’s cocurator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, who would go on to introduce Cao to the Western art world in Artforum Magazine’s “First Takes” column in 2006 (Cao 2019:58). In it, Obrist also identifies the city in flux as the animating force behind Cao’s artistic practice, writing: “With its dynamic structural changes, the city has acted as both a trigger and a backdrop for her work” (2006).

In 2003, Hou also included Cao in the 50th Venice Biennale, which commissioned and exhibited Cao’s experimental film San Yuan Li, made in collaboration with her then partner Ou Ning and other members of their art collective Uthèque, about a village on the outskirts of Guangzhou upended by the city’s rapid urban expansion. After these early successes, Cao began exhibiting internationally, in group and solo shows in Europe, the US, and Asia.

In the last decade or so, curatorial interest in Cao has converged on the technological aspect of her work, with major exhibitions defining her engagement with urbanity in terms of her pioneering use of new media, particularly her tendency to blur the boundary between physical space and virtual fantasy. For example, the exhibition text for Cao’s solo show at MoMA PS1 in 2016 reads: “the interplay between fantasy and reality animates much of the artist’s work” (MoMA 2016). The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston’s 2018 survey Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today places Cao within an international and intergenerational group of artists, including Nam June Paik, Harun Farocki, and Hito Steyerl, who have used digital technology to remake the field of art, highlighting in particular Cao’s interest in virtual worlds in video works such as RMB City (Respini Reference Respini2018).

In the 2019 group show Micro Era: Media Art from China at Kulturforum in Berlin, Cao is featured as one of four Chinese artists whose works explore “how relations between mind, body, and technology have changed over the past forty years” (Gebbers Reference Gebbers2019:4). Similarly, the online description for Cao’s solo show at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2020 opens with: “Cao Fei’s work is underpinned by an ongoing exploration of virtuality” (Serpentine 2020). Cao’s most comprehensive retrospective to date, at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in 2021, also frames her work thus: “Cao Fei has consistently focused on the complicated social pressures emerging from the entanglement of popular culture, technological development, and urban change” (UCCA 2021). More recent exhibitions in Berlin, Sharjah, and São Paulo in 2023–2024 echo this framing, positioning Cao’s work first and foremost in relation to virtual spaces and new media technologies such as the metaverse.

Scholarly and critical writing on Cao over the past 15 years has dovetailed with these curatorial narratives, most often locating her work at the intersection of China’s hyperdevelopments in urban planning and digital technology. Existing writing focuses on Cao’s use of new media forms such as online gaming, social media, and virtual reality to explore China’s strange and shifting city environment.Footnote ³ These studies tend to associate Cao’s artistic vision with technologically inflected concepts such as “posthuman” (Chau Reference Chau2017), “augmented reality” (Cornell Reference Cornell, Gaensheimer and Beßen2019), and “Asian futurism” (Wang Reference Wang2017). Critics and scholars vary in their readings of Cao’s depictions of the technologized city—as in turn utopian, dystopian, or both; emancipatory, oppressive, or both—but rarely ever venture outside of the technological framework, to define her aesthetic in more material and embodied terms.

Angie Chau, for example, analyzes Cao’s work within the context of the rise of a globalized internet and digital culture in Chinese cities. She identifies three video works in particular—i.Mirror (2007), Haze and Fog (2013), and La Town (2014)—as forming a trilogy that “fantasizes about a new posthuman consciousness” (Chau Reference Chau2017:221). Chau highlights the evocation of futuristic “posts-” in the trilogy: postapocalyptic, posthuman, postmemory—thus foregrounding the phenomenon of technologized disembodiment in Cao’s work.

Articles by Alice Ming Wai Jim (Reference Jim2012), Tom McDonough (Reference McDonough2017), Monica Merlin (Reference Merlin2018), Linda C. Zhang (Reference Zhang2019), and others operate along this same vein, contributing to the dominant understanding of Cao’s aesthetic as globalized, forward-looking, and preoccupied with using technology to transcend physical borders and bodily limits. Though these texts at times take note of the physical, corporeal, and performative elements present in Cao’s artmaking, they deem this aspect secondary to the clear prominence of digital technology.

This understanding of Cao as focused almost exclusively on the digital, technologized, and disembodied aspects of urban experience also tends to highlight works that most conspicuously invoke immersive virtual worlds, such as Cosplayers (2004), i.Mirror (2007), and the RMB City project (2008–2011). In Cosplayers, Cao films Chinese teenagers engaging in Japanese cosplay. Dressed as manga, anime, and video game characters, they roam through Guangzhou’s urban traffic and suburban farmland, acting out their digital lives in the physical spaces of the rapidly transforming city. In i.Mirror, Cao tests out the new medium of machinima—the filming of virtual spaces in real time using interactive computer graphic engines. She records herself moving through the computer-generated cityscapes of the 3D-simulated online world of Second Life as the avatar China Tracy, a svelte, dark-haired cyborg woman who serves as Cao’s online alter ego.

Given the attention to Cao’s technological engagement with Chinese urban life, it’s not surprising that her next project, RMB City, is her most widely discussed work. In this project, Cao, with support from the Serpentine Galleries, returned to the online platform of Second Life as China Tracy to build the eponymous virtual island city—what she calls “my own city utopia”—and invited artists, curators, and patrons of the global art world to come, “buy up” real estate, and host activities and events (Culp 2008).

Figure 3.

Cao Fei, still from Cosplayers, 2004. Single channel video, 4:3, color with sound, 9min 12sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers)

Figure 3 Long description

A woman sits on a spotted animal figure, while another woman rides a zebra figure in a field of tall grass and yellow flowers. The first woman wears a purple and black outfit with black boots, and the second woman wears a black outfit with a headpiece and holds black balloons. In the background, a city skyline is visible. The scene includes a deer figure with antlers.

Figure 4.

Cao Fei, still from i.Mirror, 2007. Machinima, single channel video, 4:3, color with sound, 28min. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers)

The resulting video, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2007), shows Cao’s animated city crammed with famous Chinese icons and architectural landmarks in bizarre and surreal configurations—Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Tower swings precariously from a crane above a smokestack spewing fume and flame; Tiananmen perches next to a dripping infinity pool attached to a giant wheel. The pool floods the gate’s entrance, and where Mao’s image typically sits, there is a framed portrait of a panda instead. The video pans to the other side of the gate, where the water is propelled downward in thick streams, transforming Tiananmen into the gate of the Three Gorges Dam. Elsewhere, Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl TV Tower leans against nearby buildings, half-toppled. In the island’s surrounding water, a giant shopping cart carrying a statue of the Buddhist goddess Guanyin along with several skyscrapers bobs up and down, and a rusted Bird’s Nest stadium sits half-submerged. Above the cityscape, a flying panda surveys the scene below. Set to an upbeat synth score, the virtual metropolis of RMB City resembles at once a futuristic theme park and an abandoned urban ruin, dotted with unsettling signs of some recent disaster.

In addition to RMB City: A Second Life City Planning, Cao’s RMB City project also included a number of other machinima videos and games, such as The Birth of RMB City (2009), Live in RMB City (2009), RMB City Opera (2009), and Apocalypse Tomorrow: Surf in RMB City (2011), as well as dozens of Second Life, real-life, and mixed reality performances and events, including “NO LAB in RMB City” (2008) and “Institution Opening: UCCA in RMB City” (January 2009), hosted by China Tracy and other RMB City participants. Overall, the four-year-long RMB City epitomizes the vision of technological urban futurity by which Cao is most often defined. The project received a tremendous amount of attention, in part due to the prominent art world figures who participated in the construction and development of the virtual city (the art collector Uli Sigg, then UCCA gallery director Jérôme Sans, and Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe were among those who bought up real estate and programmed events as avatars of themselves). RMB City has also been the subject of numerous academic articles and is often presented as the centerpiece of Cao’s career in overviews of her work.

Figure 5.

Cao Fei, still from RMB City: A Second Life City Planning, 2007. Machinima, single channel video, 4:3, color with sound, 5min 57sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers)

Figure 5 Long description

A surreal scene featuring a floating structure with various objects and elements. The structure includes a satellite dish, a crane, and a basket hanging from a crane. There are two large pink balloons attached to the structure. The structure appears to be floating on water, with various objects and debris scattered around it. The scene is set against a backdrop of a clear blue sky.

Many who write about RMB City celebrate its interactive nature and view the virtual city’s dissolution of physical borders and bodily limits as ushering in a liberating future of global interconnectivity and posthuman capability. Curator Hou Hanru, who helped launch Cao Fei’s career internationally, praised RMB City in 2011 for exploring a “new urban world” of digital images, which “opens up a new perspective for the invention of new forms of exchange and sharing among individuals” (Hou Reference Hou, Wiehager and Ganzenberg2015:225). Similarly, new media scholar Lori Landay writes: “we have a high degree of agency in Second Life; we can build things out of nothing, shape ourselves and our environment how we wish, and our choices are almost limitless” (Landay Reference Landay2009:21).

Despite these readings of RMB City as a wholesale celebration of digital technology, Cao’s work has also inspired critiques of this techno-utopian vision. Robin Visser, for example, points out that RMB City does not actually free users from the rules of the offline world, but merely replicates its socioeconomic norms and hierarchies. For one, “Cao Fei had to secure a financial backer in Uli Sigg in order to contract Avatrian, a Philippines- and San Francisco–based company specializing in Second Life content design, to build most of RMB City. She then needed connections to promote it” (2013:54). The logic of capital accumulation and the need for venture capital are thus the same in both First and Second Life. Furthermore, Visser points out that though users in Second Life have total freedom to choose their physical features, the similar appearance of most avatars suggest that users still adhere to the preexisting beauty standards of the offline world—never choosing, for example, “double chins […] flabby arms, beer bellies, and the like”—and are thus hardly “liberated” from the value system of First Life (56). Freedom, it seems, requires more than the mere digitization and spectacularization of our existing world.

Rather than invalidate Cao’s interest in technology, this strand of critique underlines the deep ambivalence already present in Cao’s practice. Indeed, once we move beyond the disproportionate attention given to RMB City, it becomes clear that Cao’s engagement with new media is in fact animated by an intense skepticism about the freedoms it can offer. In the night scenes of her earlier video work Cosplayers, for example, teenagers dressed as manga, anime, and video game characters return home to cramped apartments and aging parents, their superhero costumes absurdly useless in transforming their concrete living conditions. Cao’s two newer video works, Asia One (2018) and Nova (2019), are also preoccupied with how individual bodies navigate spaces made sterile and unlivable by technology. In Asia One, set in an industrial package sorting center run by robots, two human employees wander the vast factory in search of some living presence. In Nova, set in a sci-fi version of socialist Beijing—a kind of futuristic past, Cao’s protagonist becomes literally trapped inside technology as a test subject for a time machine that malfunctions, and spends the latter half of the video struggling to get back to the world outside the machine.

The virtual could never truly supplant the real, these scenes seem to remind us; we are corporeal beings, inexorably bound to the material world. A more literal, though unintentional, reminder of this came in March 2020, when the world premiere of Cao’s first virtual reality installation, The Eternal Wave, at London’s Serpentine Galleries came to a halt due to new Covid-19 protocols, which deemed the work’s shared VR headset to be unsafe. Instead, the immersive virtual experience was replaced by a reduced augmented reality version, accessible through a smartphone app (Williams Reference Williams2020). The escapist fantasies offered by digital technology always hinge, precariously, on the particular needs and vulnerabilities of our lived bodies. At the same time, these very lived bodies have always already been their own avenue for fantasy and freedom in Cao’s work. Indeed, alongside her experimentation with virtual worlds and simulated forms, there has also been a persistent attention to the power of real bodies in real places—the primacy of concrete materiality—exemplified by Cao’s repeated employment of dance and performance as a strategy of spatial intervention and transformation. This interest in dance and performance, a kind of countercurrent to the dematerialized techno-fantasies for which Cao is best known, has been present since the beginning of her career, starting with her very first work, The Little Spark (1995), a home video production of a staged performance set in Cao’s high school, and continues in works that heavily feature musical theatre, such as PRD Anti-Heroes (2005), a theatrical production featuring opera singing, hip hop dance, and other forms performed by nonprofessionals.

Cao’s use of dance and performance take on its most potent meaning and transformative power in works where performances are staged, seemingly spontaneously, by nonprofessionals in unlikely settings—for example the dancing factory workers in Whose Utopia (2006), the dancing prisoner in Prison Architect (2018), as well as the dance scenes by workers and scientists in Asia One (2018) and Nova (2019). These scenes don’t only feature dance and performance; rather, their meaning centers on the disjunction between dancing figures and their surrounding space, thus highlighting dance’s power to intervene in and transform an existing spatial logic. Three works that most explicitly heighten the contrast between the amateur dancer and the postsocialist Chinese city are Public Space—Give Me A Kiss (2002), Hip Hop: Guangzhou (2003), and Haze and Fog (2013).

Cao Fei’s Choreopolitical Aesthetic

While analyses of Cao Fei’s pathbreaking engagement with digital technology are not wrong, they are incomplete, and leave out the equally significant aspects of her work involving decidedly nontechnological elements—in particular, the dancing body.

Recently, more writing has come out, including articles by Ellen Larson (Reference Larson2020) and Kate Wong (Reference Wong2020) for example, that begin to complicate this dominant narrative by highlighting Cao’s interest in China’s socialist history and her backwards-looking (rather than only futurist) tendencies. Still, there has been little writing focusing on dance and performance in Cao’s work, despite their frequent recurrence. Jiayun Zhuang’s “Cao Fei, Performance without Transcendence” (2017) offers a rare, insightful description of dance sequences in Cao’s videos, and a thoughtful meditation on the ephemerality of performed fantasy. However, the brevity of her article (written for the magazine Parkett) leaves room for more substantive historicization and analysis.

Chris Berry’s article “Cao Fei’s ‘Magical Metropolises’” (2018) constitutes the most significant engagement with dance in Cao’s work thus far. However, while Berry rightly identifies dance as a strategy of intervention into a set of historical urban conditions, he overlooks the fact that the dancing body in Cao’s work is itself a product of these very conditions. Indeed, the genesis of Cao’s interest in dance can be traced back to her adolescent years in 1980s Guangzhou, where the rise of urbanization and digital media culture coincided with a dance craze among Chinese youths that ushered in new venues, styles, and forms of sociality (see Clark Reference Clark2012).

Figure 6.

Cao Fei, stills from Public Space—Give Me A Kiss, 2002. Single channel video, 4:3, black and white with sound, 4min 58sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers; screenshot from caofei.com)

Figure 7.

Cao Fei, stills from Public Space—Give Me A Kiss, 2002. Single channel video, 4:3, black and white with sound, 4min 58sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers; screenshot from caofei.com)

The primacy of embodied performance across many of Cao’s works posits the physical body—the most stubbornly nontechnological part of ourselves—rather than the virtual realm, as a site of urban fantasy and transformation—what I, borrowing from Lepecki, call Cao’s “choreopolitical aesthetic.” Cao’s Public Space—Give Me A Kiss, Hip Hop: Guangzhou, and Haze and Fog most prominently feature dance as an artistic strategy to critically engage with the postsocialist Chinese city. Reading them in relation to multiple, overlapping contexts of this time and place teases out the significance of dance in these three works.

Public Space—Give Me A Kiss, one of the earliest works in Cao’s oeuvre, is a five-minute black-and-white video, shot on a street corner near Xinhe Square (信和广场) in Guangzhou.Footnote ⁴ The camera focuses on a middle-aged man dressed in office attire, dancing by himself on a street corner to “Give Me A Kiss” (给我一个吻) by the singer Zhang Lu, a popular Mandarin (Mandopop) song first released in Hong Kong in 1954. The piece has the feel of a homemade music video, with various shots of the man shaking his hips and waving his arms to the rhythm of the music, energetically performing what appears to be a choreography of his own invention.

This performance bears the trace of popular entertainment imported from Hong Kong into Guangzhou in the 1980s and ’90s. In one interview, Cao recalls her adolescent media diet of VHS tapes of Cantonese popular music (Cantopop) and MTV, and the influence this had on her: “I watched a lot of blurry videos copied from the MTV channel, showing artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Sting, and many ’80s artists. Even today in my work, I put a lot of emphasis on sound, as well as motion and rhythmic video editing” (Cao and Obrist 2015:228).

Public Space is an early example of Cao’s long-term interest in the music video format; it also showcases how she subverts music video conventions of the time: the performers she features are not the global celebrities of MTV but anonymous, ordinary Chinese city dwellers. Indeed, in Public Space, there is a sense of absurdity in the disjunction between the publicness of the performance and the performer’s visibly untrained body and likely amateur status. Reflecting on Public Space four years later, Cao says of the lone dancer in the video: “I found that man on the street. He dances every day without music, and always sends kisses to people, and he’s happy in his own little world. The street and the lighting from the car are like his stage” (Cao and Chan 2006). Long shots from different angles show the anonymous dancing man surrounded by generally apathetic pedestrians and busy city traffic. He dances on though, unfazed, and occasionally blows kisses at the strangers passing him by. His infectious enthusiasm eventually attracts a few curious onlookers—a bus operator, a young woman, a father with toddler in arm—momentarily transforming this impersonal Guangzhou street corner into a space of intimate connection and interaction. These moments of spontaneous sociality take on additional poignance in retrospect. As Cao notes, the small grassy area where the man dances would soon be redeveloped into a large apartment building, highlighting the ephemerality of such public spaces and the chance encounters they engender (Cao and Chan 2006).

In Hip Hop: Guangzhou, Cao continues this absurd, yet strangely moving, take on the music video, filming and splicing together shots of quotidian urbanites dancing in the streets of Guangzhou to the beat of a hip hop track. Like the man in Public Space, these movers are dressed in daytime blue-collar work uniforms, their movements are loose and eclectic, and they dance on gritty corners of the city in various stages of demolition and construction. Even more than the earlier work, Hip Hop: Guangzhou presents a jarring incongruity between the playful act of dancing and the lived environment of the performers. Though Cao would later film iterations of this same mise-en-scène in other cities in the world—Hip Hop: Fukuoka (2005) and Hip Hop: New York (2006)—nowhere is the visual contrast between performer and surrounding space as stark as in the original video in Guangzhou, where ordinary people dance with rubble and building material piled all around them, their joyful movements incongruous among the sites of destruction.

Compared to the man dressed in office attire in Public Space, the dancers in Hip Hop: Guangzhou appear to be of lower and more precarious socioeconomic status—a construction worker, a sanitation worker, a security guard—figures who day after day do the physical labor of maintaining and rebuilding the metropolis, even as they continue to be confined to its margins. Others in the video appear even worse off—a crippled ragpicker, a petty criminal handcuffed to a pole—figures conspicuously excluded from the city’s hyperdevelopment and the country’s economic boom. The dancers’ gestures vary, from a simple arm pump to more sophisticated footwork and breakdancing steps and spins. The rhythm of their movement is accentuated by Cao’s playful editing, featuring quick cuts, slow motion, and reverse-play—techniques reminiscent of the rapid montage style of San Yuan Li, the experimental documentary Cao codirected with Ou Ning that same year.Footnote ⁵

Figure 8.

Cao Fei, stills from Hip Hop: Guangzhou, 2003. Single channel video, 5:4, color with sound, 3min 28sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers; screenshot from caofei.com)

Figure 9.

Cao Fei, stills from Hip Hop: Guangzhou, 2003, single channel video, 5:4, color with sound, 3min 28sec. (Courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers; screenshot from caofei.com)

In the way that dance destabilizes and estranges the usual flow and function of urban space, Cao’s two works can be understood in relation to a longer history of contemporary Chinese art that interacts directly with postsocialist city planning. The avantgarde art collective Big Tail Elephant Working Group (大尾象), for example, also staged performances amidst the urban sprawl of Guangzhou. Most famously, in Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995) artist Lin Yilin singlehandedly moves a cinderblock wall through a busy Guangzhou street by stacking and unstacking one brick at a time—an hours-long task that slows down the traffic around him.

Nancy Lin has described the work of Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong, Xu Tan, and other members of Big Tail Elephant as “urban insertions” that inhabit and disrupt the material conditions of the city (Lin Reference Lin, Wang and Valjakka2018:183). She distinguishes their work from the more famous “body art” of Beijing’s East Village, represented by artists such as Zhang Huan and Song Dong, whose work engaged in what became known as “behavioral art” (xingwei yishu 行为艺术). While behavioral art tested the individual body’s capacity to endure extreme pain and boredom, Big Tail Elephant’s performances “reflected an outward interest in the societal relationship between individuals and the cultural and economic realities of the urban environment,” especially by staging works in “centrally located public sites” (Lin Reference Lin, Wang and Valjakka2018:191).

Though Public Space and Hip Hop: Guangzhou are works of video art, the filmed action is site-specific performance, both in the original sense of the term as artworks that “incorporated physical conditions of a particular location as integral to [their] production” in Miwon Kwon’s words; as well as a newer, expanded notion of site-specificity as “context-specific” and “community-specific” (Kwon Reference Kwon2002:2, 3). While Cao’s two works utilize formal elements distinct to video such as nondiegetic music and rapid cuts, much of their meaning also depends on the particular urban sites in which they were set, as well as the local communities the performers represent and evoke.

In terms of artistic lineage then, Cao’s two works can be understood to build on that of the Big Tail Elephant Working Group, insofar as they too involve individual figures physically inserting themselves into the spatial logic of the urban public, and in the process exposing and questioning this logic. Unlike her Big Tail Elephant predecessors though, Cao returns time and again to the specific act of dancing. The significance of dance in Cao’s work is multilayered. On the one hand, it marks the shifts and tensions in China’s postsocialist dance and body culture. On the other, it epitomizes a key relationship between dance and politics, laid out by Lepecki who argues that dance can undermine the spatial and bodily regimes of neoliberalism.

Cao’s initial encounters with dance can be traced back to her adolescent years in 1980s–’90s Guangzhou, to the same milieu of globalization and urbanization that first sparked her interest in disembodied virtual worlds. In one interview, Cao connects her interest in the body to her teenage immersion in breakdancing, pop music, and MTV, and recalls the thrill of sneaking out to go dancing in the streets and clubs at night:

Here Cao situates her particular interest in dance historically, as something that only became possible after the end of the Cultural Revolution—a product of the emergence of new commercial entertainment spaces (clubs) and the influx of Western popular culture (breakdancing and MTV).

That Cao’s interest in the dancing body constitutes a distinctly postsocialist phenomenon is corroborated by other accounts of the shifting conditions of bodily expression in China after the Cultural Revolution. In “Fragments of the Body in Chinese Contemporary Art,” Zhang Hong describes the control and “molding” of individual bodies as a part of Mao’s Communist Revolution:

Dance, in this context, served as a political tool for translating party ideology into daily bodily practices.

Similarly, in an interview, the contemporary dancer-filmmaker Wen Hui recounts the homogeneous dance culture during the Cultural Revolution years of her childhood:

Wen cofounded her dance company Living Dance Studio with documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang. They collaborated with Cao on the multimedia performance Report on Body in 2002, and in their own work echo Cao’s sentiment about a sense of bodily liberation after the Cultural Revolution.Footnote ⁶ Like Cao, the opening of China’s borders enabled Wen to encounter new and diverse possibilities of what dance could be.Footnote ⁷

Dance’s prominence in the work of Cao, Wen, and other Chinese artists who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s reflects the centrality of dance as a popular cultural form in the era of economic reform. Indeed, during the first two decades of marketization dance swept up Chinese people young and old. New types of dance that gained popularity during this time included disco (disike) for youths, and social or ballroom dancing for adults (Clark Reference Clark2012:84). Part of the appeal of these Western commercial dances was their sheer novelty, as they had been considered “bourgeois” and banned under Mao. In Shanghai, for example, ballroom dancing was condemned during the 1950s antirightist campaigns and did not reemerge until 1979 (Farrer Reference Farrer and Deborah2000:229).

As a new nationwide pastime, dancing also catalyzed new kinds of social interactions and self-

perceptions, especially for the post-1980 generation (80 hou) (Clark Reference Clark2012:7). According to Paul Clark in Youth Culture in China, the dance craze that began in the 1980s was part of a broader cultural shift towards a focus on the body, especially among teenagers. Though physical fitness and collective choreography were central to Maoist culture, Clark observes that the consumer culture and liberal social atmosphere of the post-Mao era opened up new possibilities for how the body—its movements, dress, and sex appeal—could operate as “youthful expressions of identity and distinction” (Clark Reference Clark2012:57).

In his study of forms of sociability in commercial dance venues in 1990s Shanghai, James Farrer describes these spaces—disco clubs and social dance halls—as “play spaces” in which people had “chaotic” interactions with “unreliable” people, rather than places where dancers looked for serious relationships and marriage partners (2000:227). This was precisely dance’s selling point. The patrons Farrer interviewed “found these particular forms of play rewarding and meaningful” (227). The space of the disco club, in particular, with its dim rooms, mirrored walls, strobe lights, and partnerless dancing, was designed not for the formation of long-term relationships but for visual self-display and self-expression. As Farrer puts it: “in the disco, everyone is a star. The disco dance floor is engineered for democracy. The rhythmic pulse of the strobe lights makes everyone a good dancer” (227).

Another Western dance form to gain a nationwide following during this time was hip hop, a genre that originated in the late 1970s Bronx borough of New York City. Hip hop emerged out of a site of urban decline, like the rubble in Cao’s video. As Randy Martin pointed out, hip hop emerged from the decaying housing projects of the South Bronx at a moment in the city’s history characterized by fiscal crisis, disinvestment in social housing, and the general depreciation of urban property, which resulted in the massive destruction of some one million units of housing stock and the widespread abandonment of buildings by private landlords (Martin Reference Martin2015:186). According to Martin, hip hop, along with postmodern dance and skateboarding culture, arose during this time as a way for poor urban youths to channel their precarious living conditions as the raw material for creative expression.

Hip hop performances took place in public spaces not designed for performance, such as streets and subway cars, and interacted with these “unsanctioned surfaces of the city” in new ways (Martin Reference Martin2012:72). Breakdancing embraced movements that emphasized risk and disorientation, featuring off-center, lateral, low to the ground acrobatic shuttling and spinning, showing a body veering off its usual vertical axis, appearing to be in danger of losing balance and falling (209–11). Hip hop choreography thus disrupted preestablished relations between the body and urban space, “reorienting what is up and down,” and enabled otherwise marginalized youths to reclaim the crumbling urban environment around them as a site of performance, sociality, and play (207).

The distinctive movement vocabulary of hip hop came to China in the 1980s, not long after Deng’s market reforms and open-door policy took effect. Mass media events such as the 1984 Hollywood film Breakin’, released in China in 1987, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s film Yaogun qingnian (Rock Youth; 1988), and Michael Jackson’s Thriller album (1982) and video (1983) directly and indirectly turned hip hop dance into a nationwide sensation (see Clark Reference Clark2012:84–87; Wilcox Reference Wilcox2022:302–21). Emily Wilcox also argues for the crucial role Chinese dancers themselves played in bringing hip hop to China as early as 1984, before VHS tapes from the West were widely circulated. According to Wilcox, Chinese dance students who traveled abroad in the early 1980s came back to China to perform traveling dance shows that disseminated hip hop styles (310–11).

These touring crews took advantage of an informal concert economy that emerged in 1980s China known as zouxue (走穴), or moonlighting, which enabled state-sponsored dancers to supplement their work unit jobs by performing in popular variety shows at night and during vacations (Wilcox Reference Wilcox2022:311–12). According to Wilcox, China’s version of breakdancing, called piliwu (霹雳舞), was a localized form that merged with a preexisting dance culture, incorporating elements of “Chinese classical dance, Chinese folk and ethnic dance, disco and ballroom dancing (both of which had local varieties)” (202). Nevertheless, like its American counterpart, Chinese hip hop originated in informal, underground performances, with the zouxue phenomenon reflecting the restless and enterprising spirit of China’s urban youth. Indeed, similar to hip hop’s American creators, Chinese dancers regarded this dance form as a movement of freedom that marked a radical departure from all that dance had previously offered. As one amateur Chinese breakdancer explained to Clark: “In the past, loyalty dances [to Chairman Mao] were not a pastime; they were controlled […] But dances as a pastime depend on a person’s feelings and the free development of emotions” (in 2012:85).

Therefore, it was only after the Mao era that it became possible for the dancing body to function as it does in Cao Fei’s videos: as a vehicle of escape from oppressive norms and a site of individual expression. On the other hand, Cao has also openly acknowledged the simultaneous commercialization of the body during this period. In the same interview in which she describes the ecstasy of dancing in her youth, Cao observes: “the body is sometimes held hostage by the desires of consumerism. In this context, each body essentially becomes nothing more than a tool of transmission, the lead actor in a consumerist landscape” (Cao 2013:257).

In her interviews with professional dancers from the Mao period, Wilcox analyzes this shift from state-controlled culture towards consumerism in postsocialist Chinese dance, when choreography became dictated by the market, replacing the more proletariat-driven dance culture of the Mao era. Noting the prevalence of fieldwork under Mao, for which dancers traveled to the remote countryside to physically engage with the lived environment and bodily habits of farmers, which then formed the basis of their choreography, Wilcox argues that socialist China was a very “body centered culture,” in which “bodily experience and bodily knowledge were accorded very high importance” (Wilcox Reference Wilcox2012:3). In particular, Wilcox points to an idea in Maoist ideology known as “practice (Shijian 实践),” which made a direct link between bodily experience and revolutionary consciousness (3).

Due to this attention to bodily culture and habits, the socialist period was one of great formal innovation and advancement in dance as an art, giving birth to Chinese dance in its modern form. That the body was an aesthetic and expressive medium, and daily bodily habit a kind of choreography, were commonly held notions. With the end of the Mao era however, dancers from this earlier period mourned “the slow disappearance of the centrality of the body as a primary site of aesthetic practice, experience, and creativity” (Wilcox Reference Wilcox2012:4).

The dancing bodies in Cao’s work reflect these simultaneous shifts in embodied expression in the postsocialist period: on the one hand, the body is liberated from collective “molding” and capable of subverting established choreographic norms; on the other, it is increasingly commercialized and depoliticized as everyday life in China becomes entrenched in the global market. This paradox mirrors an existing tension articulated in dance theory more broadly—what Lepecki describes as the coexistence of neoliberalism’s “choreography of conformity” on the one hand, which gears bodily performance towards profit and order, and experimental dance’s “choreopolitics” on the other hand, which releases the body from neoliberalism’s choreographic molding (2016:3).

In Dance and the Age of Neoliberal Performance, Lepecki traces the increasing prominence of dance over the course of the 1990s–2000s in both artistic and scholarly arenas, such as museums and biennials, the philosophy of art, contemporary art history, queer theory, and critical theory (2016:7). Dance has become an important presence across these different realms, argues Lepecki, because it occupies a “privileged critical position of analysis and resistance in regards to neoliberal rationality, corporeality, and subjectivity” (8). In other words, dance offers artists and scholars the formal and theoretical tools to expose and undo the ways in which late capitalism has shaped how bodies move through and relate to the world. He writes evocatively about the choreographic and corporeal nature of neoliberalism, referring to its conditioning as “our shared nervous system. Including art’s and theory’s nervous systems. Through them, we sense and make sense, we enflesh. Bodies fibrillating with and against the rhythms of our era” (3).

That neoliberalism can be productively understood as a set of bodily habits, movements, rhythms, and orientations—in short, as choreography—is further suggested by Lepecki when he posits performance as a crucial new political condition of power:

For Lepecki, our “age of neoliberal performance” is exemplified by the global emergence of the figure of the entrepreneur, as well as the rise of selfie culture, both of which entail a continuous performance of self in order to stay socially and/or economically viable. This self-performance also epitomizes neoliberalism’s tendency to present all aspects of life—success and failure, risk and security—as purely individual, and, under the guise of promising personal freedom and empowerment, foreclose the possibility of social solidarity and communal life (13).

The choreographic experimentations dance enables, on the other hand, make possible another type of performance: not performance as individuality, done for the sake of profitable future returns, but performance as “singularity.” Lepecki takes this concept from Georges Didi-Huberman, who defines singularity, as translated by Lepecki, as “irreducible, and therefore, a bearer of strangeness”—that which makes the familiar unrecognizable and incomprehensible (6). Didi-Huberman’s notion of the term, in turn, encompasses Gilles Deleuze’s description of singularities as “turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling” (Deleuze [Reference Deleuze1969] 1990:52). In short, singularity is at once a quality, a position, and an event—a pivotal moment when the established order is (however briefly) destabilized, estranged, and transformed.

The contrast Lepecki draws between experimental dance and neoliberal performance, singularity and individuality, is crystallized in another pair of concepts he introduces in an earlier text: choreopolitics and choreopolice—two fundamentally different ways of organizing bodily movements, affects, and senses (2013). These two concepts build on the opposition Jacques Rancière sets up between “police” and “politics” in his essay “Ten Theses on Politics,” in which he differentiates between them in spatial terms, as two opposing conceptions of how space should be used:

Here, “the police” does not refer to law enforcement officers but rather a certain spatial logic that partitions space into specific uses and prioritizes order and control over freedom of expression, corralling bodies into predetermined paths designed to demobilize political action. The movements, gestures, and orientations permissible within this logic amount to a kind of predetermined choreography—“choreopolice” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2013:19–20).

Choreopolitics, on the other hand, is a kind of deliberate, organized movement that departs from conventional notions of choreography as a practice of command and obedience, and instead enacts in kinetic form “politics” in Rancière’s sense of the word, as that which produces “dissensus”—a process that intends to “rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings that were previously unrelated” (2010:141). Here, “the political” means paradoxically a fundamental break from political reality as we know it. According to Rancière, what is commonly considered “reality” is actually just the prevailing way of making sense of sensory experience. Truly political art, then, dismantles this shared sense of the sensory by reframing sensory experience. Only by doing so can art carry out the revolutionary task of suspending and negating the dominant way of seeing, understanding, and experiencing the world, and open up the possibility of alternatives. With choreopolitics, Lepecki extends Rancière’s understanding of the political—as “an intervention upon the visible and the sayable” (Rancière [Reference Rancière1998] 2001)—to include the moveable and choreographable. In short, choreopolitics is a movement logic that disobeys the spatial order of the police, deviates from neoliberalism’s “choreography of conformity,” and produces dissensus.

In Cao’s videos, the spatial order of the police comes in the form of the postsocialist Chinese city. As Robin Visser notes, Chinese city planning after 1978 took to an extreme the neoliberal architectural practices of the West, which treated the city not as historical, lived space but rather as a tabula rasa whose development can be entirely planned from the top down:

In Public Space and Hip Hop: Guangzhou, Cao films the city from the perspective of its overlooked population and shows how, by moving differently, residents can open up alternative spatial possibilities to neoliberal city planning. The function of dance in these two works showcases the distinctly choreopolitical dimension of Cao’s aesthetic. The power of this aesthetic lies largely in its investment in the agentic potential of corporeality—one of the aspects of dance Lepecki deems crucial to critiquing neoliberal performance. As he puts it, the corporeal nature of dance “demonstrates to dancers and audiences alike concrete possibilities to embody-otherwise—since a dancer’s labor is nothing else than to constantly embody, disembody, and re-embody, to incorporate as well as excorporate, thus permanently refiguring corporeality” (2016:15). Corporeality, in its recalcitrant concreteness, can serve as a precious site of agency, especially in a system governed by abstract forces of discipline and control. As Carrie Noland argues, the moving body offers a way to get beyond “the inability, after Foucault, to produce a convincing account of agency.

[…D]espite the very real force of social conditioning, human subjects continue to invent surprising new ways of altering the inscribed behaviors they are called on to perform” (2009:7–8). The moving body produces agency, even when merely completing a routine task, due to what Noland calls the “sixth sense” of kinesthesia—the body’s sensations of its own movement, “without which the subject would not be able to distinguish her own body from other bodies; would have no capacity for independent movement; and thus would be incapable of assuming any agency at all” (9).

Noland locates the agency of the moving body in instances as small as variations in the reiteration of learned gestures. It’s not about producing entirely original movements, but rather in the very experience of kinesthesia itself, in the body’s awareness of its own motions, that agency arises. Though the body is the medium through which a society of discipline and control builds its system of gestures, it is also the part of ourselves that experiences movement as more than just an instrumental tool of communication and productivity: “as a motor phenomenon, gesturing not only sculpts the moving body, transforming it into a technical prosthesis” (4); it also, as Noland argues, opens the possibility for “kinesthetic awareness, the intensity of which may cause subjects to alter the very ways they move” (2).

Indeed, the dancer’s ability to “embody-otherwise” is even greater than the average kinesthetic subject, due to choreography. Choreography is not just a single disruptive act, but a set of movements, a movement pattern and logic, that allows dancer and viewer to enter into a different rhythm and spatial awareness. By breaking out into a different kind of choreography, Cao’s dancers throw the already choreographic nature of contemporary life into sharp relief. Their dissensual movements expose the bodily practices imposed on them from without, and highlight the possibility of breaking free from them. SanSan Kwan, building on Noland, finds that “space can be an agent that determines movement,” but movement can also determine our perception of space (2013:4). Choreography is thus a mutual process: “space choreographs bodies” but “bodies [can also] choreograph space” (4). Dance can be “a way of knowing,” and to dance is to transform one’s kinesthetic experience of a space—to know one’s space differently (3).

In Cao’s dancers, the choreography of China’s neoliberal city planning is met with a counter-choreography. This is especially significant given the dancers’ visibly marginal status, particularly in Hip Hop: Guangzhou, which features low-wage workers, the unemployed, the homeless, the elderly, and children—people who otherwise lack the power or means to stake claims on their surrounding space. In this way, Cao’s two works illustrate an inherent feature of Lepecki’s choreopolitics: the belief that ordinary bodies, through a different set of movements and orientations, can overturn an established spatial regime and forge new ways of relating to their lived environment.

Through dance, Cao’s performers momentarily repurpose the surfaces of their city, estrange the urban environment’s “normal” utilitarian function as a site of commerce and transit, and release themselves and others from their predetermined roles as consumers, vendors, workers, and commuters. As they stage performances against the backdrop of a city being unmade and remade in the image of global capital, Cao’s choreopolitical dancers briefly find a different use for these urban spaces in flux—as unprofitable and unproductive sites of pleasure, play, and sociality. Through their physical movements then, ordinary folks defy the logic of neoliberal urban planning and momentarily reclaim the city as their own.

While Public Space—Give Me A Kiss and Hip Hop: Guangzhou depict city exteriors before and during China’s urban transformation, Haze and Fog (2013), Cao’s fictional narrative video made 10 years later, focuses on the domestic interiors of a new kind of housing that emerged in the 1990s to replace older architectural structures. As Visser notes, the amount of building in Chinese cities between 1990 and 2010 increased by around 250 percent (2010:53). In Beijing, most of the courtyard houses (siheyuan) in some 7,000 traditional hutong, the alleyways in the Old City, were torn down (36).

Chaiqian, or “demolition and relocation,” became a commonplace experience among city dwellers, who were often incentivized, if not coerced, to evacuate their long-time homes and move into new residential high-rises. Though relocation often meant cleaner and more spacious living conditions, it also meant the destruction of decades-old community ties, since the structures being demolished did not serve only the utilitarian purpose of housing, but also as social spaces that held communities together by enabling and sustaining intimate encounters, interactions, and relations among neighbors, which could not easily be replicated in modern apartment buildings. These rapid changes, not only to specific places but also to the overall logic and design of urban space, resulted in a prevalent sense of homelessness among Chinese city-dwellers; they were not unhoused, but home-less. Visser remarks: “That uncanny sense of the unheimlich, the feeling of not being spiritually at home anywhere, plagues the urbanite disconnected from her cultural roots” (Visser Reference Visser2010:80).

In Haze and Fog, Cao Fei examines the day-to-day life of a group of uprooted urbanites—financially comfortable property owners who are nevertheless haunted by a sense of home-lessness. Composed mostly of static long shots, the 46-minute video takes place in and around a high-rise apartment complex in Beijing.Footnote ⁸ The first few scenes document the complex’s various spaces and inhabitants, framing lone human figures against large empty spaces: a young woman stands at her large balcony overlooking concrete city buildings engulfed in smog; an old man in a wheelchair (played by documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang) idles by a dried-up European-style fountain; in another part of the estate grounds, two security guards crouch by a pond in a Chinese-style garden, eating ice cream bars in silence. Cao’s camera is mostly static and distant, framing the individual in their environment, with very few close-ups or moving shots, signaling that the focus is not on individual action but rather body-space relations.

As the video unfolds, we see more scenes of daily life. A man dressed in a polo shirt and slacks putts a golf ball around his shiny living room floor while, a few

feet away, his pregnant wife (played by actress Liu Lu) stares up at the ceiling. Eventually she lets out a piercing scream, which he ignores. Elsewhere in the building, a group of women dressed in black do identical yoga poses while a cleaning lady mops the spaces between their mats. These scenes contain no dialog, and the only sounds heard throughout are ambient noises (distant traffic, cicada cries) and music (both diegetic and nondiegetic). The silence, like the gray haze outside, lends an air of oppressiveness to these upscale spaces of rest and leisure.

The setting of Haze and Fog exemplifies what Visser identifies as one of the most coveted kinds of housing in postsocialist China: a high-rise gated community equipped with luxury amenities tailored to the needs of business elites and corporate expatriates (2010:50). Jie Li, in her microhistory of Shanghai alleyway homes, distinguishes housing, “physical territories with tangible boundaries,” from havens or homes, “assemblages of artifacts familiar to the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and fingers, providing a sense of comfort and continuity, solace and security” (2014:22, 99). Li traces nostalgia for alleyway homes to the loss of social ties and, more interestingly, the loss of a certain attachment to material things in the shift from an era of scarcity under Mao to one of accelerated production and consumption after 1978. The material abundance of this post-1978 era led paradoxically to an inability to connect with the material world, as Li learned after her extensive interviews with residents of one Shanghai alleyway: “everyday artifacts—however varied and individuated—became disposable and forgettable because their consumers never had the need to invest them with their own labor and creativity, sentience and memories” (136).

Figure 10.

Cao Fei, still from Haze and Fog, 2013. Single channel HD video, 16:9, color with sound, 46 min. 30 sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers)

Figure 11.

Cao Fei, still from Haze and Fog, 2013. Single channel HD video, 16:9, color with sound, 46 min. 30 sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers)

While new residential housing, such as the one in Haze and Fog, offer more privacy, autonomy, and physical security, they lack a sense of home, lack objects and spaces inscribed with personal meanings “through years of diligent use and care” (21). The characters in Cao’s video display their sense of home-lessness precisely through signs of material disconnect: in the numb and careless way they handle their surrounding objects and spaces, and even their own bodies. In one scene, the living room golfer turns on the tap in his bathroom only to completely ignore the water flowing out of the faucet, displaying a disregard for physical resources that would have been unthinkable during the Mao years. In another, the pregnant housewife chops off her own finger while cooking but barely seems to notice.

Figure 12.

Cao Fei, still from Haze and Fog, 2013. Single channel HD video, 16:9, color with sound, 46 min. 30 sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers)

Figure 13.

Cao Fei, still from Haze and Fog, 2013. Single channel HD video, 16:9, color with sound, 46 min. 30 sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers)

Cao’s characters also seem unable to distinguish between the real and the artificial, the living and the dead. A deliveryman drops and breaks a box of watermelons and later replaces them with inflatable watermelon balls. In the apartment of Wu Wenguang’s handicapped old man, where he lives alone, a toy cat is propped up on the dining table to look like a living creature. When a zombie first appears 12 minutes into the video, arms dangling from a rigid torso, spots of dried blood covering his blank face, the “living” characters around him take no notice, perhaps because they are no more sentient than he.

Most interpretations of Cao’s video focus on the zombie as a metaphor for the sense of alienation and malaise experienced by inhabitants of the cold and gray residential estate. Xavier Aldana Reyes writes in the e-book that accompanied the exhibition of Haze and Fog at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester, England: “Cao Fei seems to have chosen this characteristic monster [the zombie] for its metaphorical potential. […Her zombies] are there to literalise the themes and anxieties that pepper the film’s just over forty minutes: isolation, compulsion, apathy, mindlessness” (2013:17).

Rather than read the zombie as a manifestation of some intangible psychological or emotional state however, it makes more sense, in the context of Cao’s sustained interest in physical performance, to read zombification as a literal, physical condition of the body. That is, instead of a body without a brain or soul, the zombie here is a body without feelings, unrooted from its surroundings, never at home. As such, the zombie can be understood as one of a range of bodily responses to the spatial logic of the apartment complex. This reading makes particular sense given that the way out of this logic, as offered by Cao in Haze and Fog, also rests with the body—specifically, through individual acts of dance.

As Haze and Fog proceeds, scenes of stifling and alienating home life are interrupted by interludes of magical realism that introduce rare instances of attachment and embrace between the individual body and its material surroundings. These interludes are accompanied by music—most memorably the dance track “Tango Pasion”—that shifts the piece into the mode of the music video, marking a clear lineage to earlier works such as Public Space—Give Me A Kiss and Hip Hop: Guangzhou. The tango music first plays towards the middle of the video, after a mysterious boulder crashes into the yoga studio. The next few shots cut between cleaners in the hallway and the old man sitting alone in his apartment, who slowly and sensuously drapes a floral dress over his face, his movement in sync with the rhythm of the music. Though the dress does not look particularly expensive, the old man’s adoring gestures transform it into a precious object, charged with personal, even erotic, meaning.

Chris Berry reads the old man’s interaction with the dress as a kind of dance with the lingering presence of the wearer, an act that momentarily “re-enchants” the sterile space around him, infusing it with the personal history and affective intimacy of a home (2018:229).

The next time the tango music plays, it is to accompany the supermarket dance described above. The scene opens with tracking shots down a supermarket aisle, showing row upon row of cooking oil and baijiu (Chinese sorghum wine) of all different flavors and brands—an example of the glut of material goods in postsocialist China that, according to Jie Li, has paradoxically led to a general inability to feel rooted and attached to the material world. In this scene though, a new process of material attachment is taking place, as the pregnant housewife with the chopped finger moves exuberantly to the rhythm of the tango track, turning the quotidian tasks of grocery shopping—pushing the cart back and forth, reaching up and down for items on the shelf—into aesthetic gestures.

Figure 14.

Cao Fei, still from Haze and Fog, 2013. Single channel HD video, 16:9, color with sound, 46 min. 30 sec. (Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers)

Her dance transforms the surrounding space and objects too. As she twirls with a bottle of cooking wine in hand and bows to stacks of Red Bull with absurd, yet earnest, devotion, the disenchanted setting of the supermarket becomes a site of playful fantasy, momentarily released from the usual logic of global capitalist consumption and production. In the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, Rebekah Kowal and Gerald Siegmund write: “dance embodies the phenomenological condition of sentience, bringing together the simultaneous experiences of feeling, doing, knowing, and desire” (in Kowal, Siegmund, Martin Reference Kowal, Siegmund, Martin, Rebekah, Siegmund and Martin2017:14). If the zombie in Haze and Fog signifies a body without sentience, then the individual act of dancing can be understood to restore feelings and literally bring the body back to life.

In Haze and Fog, as in Public Space—Give Me A Kiss and Hip Hop: Guangzhou, individual acts of dance and performance briefly forge a sense of rootedness and attachment between body and space, and imbue an alienating new urban environment with affective intimacy and at-homeness. As such, they exemplify a distinct artistic strategy, and constitute a choreopolitical aesthetic running throughout Cao’s oeuvre, in which the moving body functions as a site of agency and a vehicle for spatial disruption and transformation. Unlike the virtual fantasies created by digital technologies, the performing bodies in these works embrace, rather than escape from, the material world, and remake the organizing logic of the postsocialist Chinese city, if only for a moment.