Whose Utopia? 谁的乌托邦 Favorite 

Whose Utopia? was made by the Chinese artist Cao Fei and filmed at the OSRAM lighting factory in Foshan in the Pearl River Delta in southern China during 2005 and 2006. It was commissioned as part of a project entitled ‘What Are They Doing Here?’ that was run by the Siemens Art Program from 2000 to 2006 and involved Chinese artists undertaking six-month-long residencies at industrial facilities across the country. Cao Fei began her residency at OSRAM by sending a questionnaire to its employees that featured fifty questions, including ‘How do you feel about the factory?’, ‘Why did you decide to leave your home and go to the river delta?’ and ‘What do you hope to achieve in the future?’ (Cao Fei and Strom 2006, accessed 17 February 2015). The artist then invited fifty-five of her respondents to plan and participate in workshops in which they made installations and carried out performances, which she then filmed.

This work’s focus on factory labourers in China and its title Whose Utopia? seem to question who it is that benefits from the significant economic progress that the country saw during the early twenty-first century. In 2007 Cao Fei noted that the Chinese migrants who comprise the majority of workers in the Pearl River Delta have ‘no rights, no benefits, and no power’ as a result of leaving their home provinces to work in large cities, and argued that the corporate and state pursuit of ‘huge business value’ has meant that the ‘personal value’ of Chinese workers is often overlooked. These ideas are reflected in the first part of Whose Utopia?, which shows workers in highly regimented production lines, and in the final scene in which the phrase ‘My Future is Not a Dream’ is presented. However, Cao Fei stated in 2007 that the second part of the video, which shows the workers performing, aims to counter their lack of individuality since in this section ‘we focus on the innermost feelings of every individual in this globalised production chain ... We place them at the centre of attention, so as to let them rediscover their personal value’.