The play of Sino-futurism and Sino-pessimism in Cao Fei’s ode to logistics anchors the five newly commissioned works in One Hand Clapping. The installation features workers’ uniforms, corporate ephemera and interviews with real employees at the Chinese ecommerce giant Jingdong, suggesting lives enmeshed in exploitation, alienation and marketing ideologies.
Past and present conditions of labour – be it Great Leap Forward-style optimism about constructing socialist modernity, or networked capitalist consumption and circulation – are the backdrop to a romance between two workers, the promise of human connection suspended between fantasy and reality. Incorporating choreographic sequences from the 1960s revolutionary opera On the Docks and dazzling 3D models of logistical operations, there’s plenty in Asia One to indulge fetishists of China’s socialist past or hyperdeveloped future. But instead of leisurely idyll, Asia One presents a near-future in which the regime of work has been replaced by a totalised dystopia of control, surveillance, isolation and ennui. Sure, there’s not much work for humans in the fully automated warehouses depicted in Cao Fei’s video and multimedia installation Asia One (2018) – included in this survey of artists exploring the impacts of technology and globalisation on our understanding of the future – compared to the labour-intensive factory in the same artist’s Whose Utopia (2006).
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