Videos from the Haudenschild Collection by Cao Fei and Yang Fudong were the inspiration for the Arizona State University Art Museum’s exhibition Business As Usual: New Video from China Cao Fei and Yang Fudong on view from September 15 – December 8, 2007 at the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; August 18 – September 27, 2008 at MassArt, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston; and October 1 – December 1, 2009 at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle.

Cao Fei, Whose Utopia, 2006 Video

The videos selected were Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia (2006) and Yang Fudong’s City Lights (2000) and Honey (2003). Click here for more information about the exhibition.

Business As Usual is an opportunity to examine two of the most prominent contemporary Chinese video artists. Both Cao Fei and Yang Fudong address the emergence of a new middle class in China. Contemporary artists in China employ a range of media to explore the experience of living in a rapidly changing urban environment. Globalization has brought them into contact with Western contemporary art, which explains the increasing visual similarity, but their concerns remain unique to present-day China.

In Whose Utopia, Cao Fei portrays workers who left their small hometown to pursue life in the big city. They took with them dreams to be dancers and singers, and ended up in factories. Working with employees in a light bulb factory, Cao Fei has the workers dress in the garb of their dreams and perform within the environment of their actual lives, the factory.

Yang Fudoing’s film and video work portrays his generations of people in their late 20s and 30s who are part of the emerging middle class in China who hover between the past and present. Fudong’s work epitomizes how the recent and rapid modernization of China has overthrown traditional values and culture. He skillfully balances this dichotomy to create works endowed with classic beauty and timelessness.

The exhibition is co-curated by Marilyn A. Zeitlin, former-Director and Chief Curator, and Heather S. Lineberry, Senior Curator and Interim Director, of the ASU Art Museum.

Yang Fudong, CIty Light, 2000 Video

Yang Fudong, Honey, 2003 Video