March 10, 2012 |
What made this vehicle particularly noticeable to the capital’s citizens, though, was its Thomas the Tank Engine frontage. The Dong Feng, or East Wind company, lorry’s makeover was thanks to China’s foremost young art star, Cao Fei, who had given it a starring role in East Wind, one of her latest videos.
At first glance, Thomas, the loveable British television character seems a rather different beast to the teens enmeshed in China’s Cosplay subculture, captured dressing up like Manga characters and playing fantastical games in COSplayers, one of Fei’s earliest videos, from 2004. The talking train’s live-action animation is also a long way from RMB City, the virtual art utopia she created within the 3-D online game Second Life, in 2008, which shot her to global art stardom.
Yet Thomas, it turns out, has a similar international reach to the more adult, high-tech fantasy worlds Fei has previously explored (not to mention an equally mighty grip on the human imagination). Since 2008, he and CBeebies characters, such as the inhabitants of In the Night Garden – who feature in PostGarden, Eye-SPY, a related photography series by Fei – have become fixtures on Chinese TV. They’re global ambassadors of kids’ entertainment, as coveted by toddlers there as anywhere.
Play – as in games, but also putting on a show – is a far-reaching motif in Fei’s work. In fact, performance and art are part of her lifeblood. Her father, Cao Chong’en, is a sculptor, best known for his Bruce Lee sculpture on Hong Kong’s Avenue of Stars, and in her teens she acted in TV commercials and started out as a TV art director. It all paved the way for her pop-savvy, media-sharp take on how capitalism, daydreams and new technology shape how we see the world.
Fei’s recent interest in characters that absorb young minds as malleable as Play-Doh seems a natural progression. Of course, the fun and games have a more serious side. With PostGarden, for instance, the mitten-handed, cloth-skinned folks are, like Thomas, freed from their animated, puppet universe to wander in the real, less-hospitable world. Fei shows them fleeing the grassy spaces of the garden for quarry-like barren terrain. As with her earlier work, they explore how China’s development and shifting cultural identity is underpinned by worlds of make-believe.
by Skye Sherwin
