From Escapism to Engagement: Cao Fei’s ‘Tidal Flux’ as a Testament to the Predicament and Left-Wing Melancholia in Chinese Contemporary Art

Cao Fei’s mid-career retrospective at the Pudong Art Museum, titled ‘Tidal Flux’, gestures toward the inexorable flow of time, much like the ceaseless rise and fall of tides. Yet, half of the Chinese title, ‘Zhou He’—a term evoking the harmonious balance of space—remains untranslated, a subtle but telling omission. This absence speaks volumes about the broader challenges of translation and cross-cultural exchange, where something essential is often lost or rendered contextually irrelevant. This tension mirrors a larger dynamic in the presentation of Chinese contemporary art to the world—a process fraught with misrecognition, mistranslation, and selective visibility. As much as it addresses time’s unstoppable current, ‘Tidal Flux’ becomes a metaphor for the complex cultural flux between China and global audiences.

This exhibition is more than a presentation of Cao Fei’s two decades of career. It envelops viewers in a meditation on space and time, the central dualities that have shaped her work. Over the years, Cao’s oeuvre has continuously drawn upon symbols that reflect China’s sociopolitical transformations. From Soviet-era cosmological dreams to Douyin (TikTok) clips, from the avatars of ‘Second Life’ to the immersive landscapes of the metaverse, her work is characterized by a consistent ability to distill the spirit of the times into potent visual and narrative metaphors. But it’s not just the transformation of China that Cao captures. Beneath her keen representations of the zeitgeist, there lurks a deeper melancholy—what cultural theorist Mark Fisher might describe as ‘left-wing melancholia’—a sense of dashed hopes and unrealized potential. This trajectory, from escapism to engagement, mirrors not only Cao’s own artistic development but also the shifting realities of China’s position in the world.

One of the most resonant early works in her career, ‘Whose Utopia’ (2006), exemplifies this melancholic undercurrent. The video, filmed in a lightbulb factory, is divided into three chapters: first, a documentary-like portrayal of the manufacturing process, from molten glass to packaging; second, a surreal sequence of factory workers performing incongruous dances among the machinery; and finally, deadpan portraits of the young workers themselves. The workers’ expressionless faces and the relentless machinery contrast sharply with the title’s evocation of utopia. The dream of a prosperous future seems hollow, a mere façade masking the dehumanizing conditions of industrial labour. This dissonance is further emphasized by the workers’ T-shirts, emblazoned with the phrase, ‘My Future is Not a Dream’—a direct reference to a 1988 pop hit by Tom Chang. What was once an anthem of hope now feels like a cruel joke in 2024. The work captures the dark irony of China’s breakneck economic boom, which promised prosperity but, in reality, delivered alienation.

This sense of alienation becomes even more poignant in retrospect. In 2024, as China’s economic landscape shifts and the global political order fractures, the question posed in ‘Whose Utopia’: Where is my future? — feels more urgent than ever. The workers in Cao’s video might just as well be asking this question on behalf of an entire generation, disillusioned by the broken promises of modernity. Fisher’s notion of capitalist realism—the idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—haunts ‘Whose Utopia’. The utopian dreams of idealistic communism have been replaced by a bleak acceptance of the status quo.

Cao Fei’s ‘RMB City: A Second Life City Planning by China Tracy’ (2007) propelled her onto the global stage, bringing these themes to a wider audience. In this work, Cao created a virtual city within the online role-playing game ‘Second Life’, adopting the alias China Tracy, an avatar navigating a digital metropolis filled with potent symbols of contemporary China—pandas, bicycles, skyscrapers, construction helmets, and even Tian’anmen Square. ‘RMB City’ was a speculative vision of China at a time of rapid globalization, when the nation seemed poised to fully integrate with the global order. The 2008 Beijing Olympics were just around the corner, and Chinese artists were fetching record prices at international auctions. Yet, beneath this optimism lay the same tensions and anxieties present in ‘Whose Utopia’. The virtual world offered a space of escape, a place to rewrite narratives and identities in ways that reality did not allow. For Cao, the project was a means of engaging with China’s shifting global role, but it also hinted at a deeper confusion about that role. The virtual city, much like the real China, was evolving rapidly, but its future was uncertain.

As the 2020s dawned, however, Cao’s work took on a new urgency. The escape into virtual worlds that characterized her earlier practice gave way to a more direct engagement with social and political realities. In ‘Screen Autobiography’ (2023), for instance, she turned her attention to the rise of social media and its impact on global culture. The work’s vertical screens, ring lights, and green screens evoke the aesthetics of platforms like Douyin and TikTok, where short videos are produced and consumed at an unprecedented scale. These platforms have not only shaped how people interact with media but have also come to symbolize the global influence of Chinese technology companies like ByteDance. The screens in Cao’s installation are reminiscent of traditional Chinese room dividers, once used to separate and define physical space. Today, the divisions are digital, created by algorithms that silo users into individualized content bubbles. Though we are ostensibly more connected than ever, the algorithmic nature of social media often deepens our isolation. Cao’s use of this imagery critiques the way technology both connects and divides, raising questions about the nature of contemporary communication and cultural exchange.

This critique extends into the realm of film in Cao’s ‘NOVA’ (2019), which occupies a central place in the exhibition. The film, set in a replica of a pre-1990s workers’ cinema, is steeped in nostalgia. Every element of the installation—from the plywood flip seats to the typefaces on the posters and banners—evokes a bygone era, a period of socialist collectivism and shared cultural experiences. Yet, ‘NOVA’ is not simply an exercise in nostalgia. The film is filled with anachronisms, blending the aesthetics of the past with futuristic elements like LED sunglasses and neon-lit scenes that recall the visual language of contemporary sci-fi. In this way, ‘NOVA’ becomes a meditation on time itself—an attempt to reconcile the past with an imagined future, neither of which fully materializes. This sense of temporal dislocation reflects what Fisher describes as ‘hauntology’, coined by Jacque Derrida—the idea that the futures we once imagined are now ghosts and spectres, haunting our present with their unfulfilled promises.

In ‘NOVA’, the influence of classic sci-fi films like Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’ (1972) and ‘Stalker’ (1979), plus other sci-fi works such as ‘Interstellar’ (2014), ‘Three-Body Problem’ (2008), is palpable, but so too is the weight of China’s unrealized utopias. The Soviet experts, worn-out factory infrastructure, and propaganda fonts all point to a lost era of communist optimism, while the futuristic elements evoke a China that could have been—a China where communism might have evolved into something more than just a spectre. But instead, the film suggests, we are left with the detritus of those failed dreams, caught between a past that no longer holds sway and a future that never arrived. The overly stylish characters (or caricatures) and dramatic theatrical lightings offered an unauthentic mood, which solidified the ‘fakeness’ of this alternative reality.

Cao Fei’s shift from virtual escapism to more socially engaged work is emblematic of the broader trajectory of Chinese contemporary art. In the early 2000s, China was a hot topic in global cultural discourse. Its artists were celebrated for their distinctiveness, their ability to offer a window into a rapidly transforming society. But as China’s global position has changed—becoming more isolated politically and culturally—its artists find themselves in a more precarious position. To be unique is no longer the imperative. Instead, the challenge is to engage with a world that is increasingly homogenized, yet deeply divided. The sense of alienation that runs through Cao’s work mirrors the experience of many Chinese artists today, who must navigate a cultural landscape that is both highly visible and yet increasingly marginalized.

Cao Fei’s predicament is not hers alone. It reflects the malaise of a generation of artists struggling to find relevance in a world where the promises of both socialism and capitalism have failed to deliver. The melancholy that pervades her work is not just a personal emotion; it is a reflection of a broader cultural condition, one that Fisher might have described as a pervasive left-wing melancholia. In a world where the future seems perpetually deferred, where even the act of imagining alternatives feels futile, Cao’s work serves as a haunting reminder of the futures that might have been—and the ones that may yet still come.

This article is selected in the shortlist of IAAC10.