Cao Fei at Lombard-Freid Projects: Thomas the Tank Engine Meets Globalization, Pollution, and Politics in 21st Century China

By Daniel Solecki

A new show of film and photography by Cao Fei at Lombard-Freid projects is turning heads, and not just because of the international spotlight on Chinese contemporary art since Ai Weiwei’s arrest. Cao, like Wang Qingsong, another Chinese contemporary artist who has shown work in New York this year, takes on themes of Chinese history and the westernization of Chinese culture. Fei’s show here, called Play Time, uses childhood objects and characters from popular children’s television shows to address the relationship between western culture and the culture of the new China. A series of diptych photographs tells the story of a group of characters from the CBeebies, a British children’s television show popular in China. The characters, resembling robots and vaguely zoomorphic beings, are dressed in garishly colored full body costumes. Instead of frolicking about through an Arcadian fantasyland, the characters seem trapped in the liminal spaces of contemporary China. The group of friends finds shelter around a fire under a newly constructed highway overpass, takes a rest by a polluted steam behind a factory, and finds opportunity for fun in a hellish puddle on a landfill. In another diptych, the friends, all wearing luridly cartoonish frowns, bury one of their own in between trees in a paper plantation.

At the back of the gallery’s main room is a film called East Wind, depicting the travels of a dump truck with a Thomas the Tank Engine front delivering garbage from central Beijing to dump on the outskirts of the city. The title is a play on the name of the dump truck’s company Dong Feng, which literally means “east wind”, quoting a famous line from Mao Zedong that proclaims, “the east wind will triumph over the west wind.” In the gallery’s back room, there is another film—a series of three shorts done entirely in shadow-puppets. Called A Rock, a Dictator, a Transmigration, the shorts deal with themes from Chinese fairy tales and the reign of Mao during the Cultural Revolution as told through the child-like medium of shadow puppets.

All of Cao’s projects attempt to combine the world of child’s play with the real world—the world wrought with very adult problems. Effectively using art to engage homelessness, existential crises, consumer culture, and globalization is difficult to do without cliché. In using characters from British children’s television shows, not only is Cao Fei highly inventive, her approach opens up a new set of ways to think about the contemporary world and each individual’s relation to it. By approaching infinitely complex contemporary issues from the vantage of children, Cao is providing us with a clear parable—that in the face of vast chaos and towering ambiguity of the contemporary world, we can only react like meek children—with confused, cartoonish reactions to it all. In trying to understand the true historical scope of environmental issues, poverty, social fragmentation, 20^th century dictatorships, the relationship between the pre-modern and the modern, and the world-historically significant culture clashes between East and West in the globalized era, we are reduced to abstracting the world into recognizable symbols like the CBeebie’s dramatic frown over the grave of his friend or Mao Zedong’s face becoming a yapping shadow-puppet dog. Or worse, we will, like children, gloss over these huge unanswered questions—a huddled group of homeless people becoming a stage set from a cartoon, the clash between East and West becoming nothing more than mere child’s play.

The show runs through June 25.