Cao Fei’s RMB City is a multifaceted virtual world project that takes the form of a fantasy city. I find myself attracted to the aesthetic, but I’m skeptical of the works success. Second Life as a game, or community is an intriguing notion, but as a critical space, it is perhaps not the most relevant area of the web to look at when examining our relationship to our virtual selves. This might be integral to the work, and ad an element to the Satire involved, but this is difficult to determine given how the world is talked about my Cao Fei and her Avatar China Tracey.
In RMB City Symbols of China’s past and present have been condensed into one sprawling architectural island built in Second Life. The iconic CCTV building dangles over the city next to a giant floating panda. A half submerged statue of Mao lies off the coast and the controversial Tiananmen Square has become a wadding pool. As one icon clashes with another, a steady streams of ships enter and exit the city’s port. RMB City is a satirical representation of what we might call the “Chinese Dream.” In this sense it takes on a style reminiscent of anachronistic futures from North America (Images of the future made in the past) but there is a knowing sense of irony and control of the style that makes the dream as much about exploration as it is about satire. Satire, always a difficult tool to wield, blends with a sense of admiration. It is often difficult to tell how Fei is approaching the topic. At the very least we can say that Fei is inviting the viewer into her virtual world to explore the Utopian mind-set of the new China while trying to understand the environment that has built up around her.
In setting up an exploratory space, Fei asks a question that is not asked of many anachronisitic futures; what goes into sustaining a future where the vision presented is a possible reality? This is where Cao Fei’s project starts to differ from other future projections. The title “RMB” is an abbreviation of the Chinese currency. It is cringe educing to imagine the Canadian equivalent, “Loonie City”. When said in Chinese, RMB City sounds like “The People’s City” revealing contrasting elements behind Chinese growth. We could think of “people’s” in the possessive term, in that the city belongs to the people, or as a commodity where people and their labor are sold. Fei’s use of Second life highlights the double reading of the term. In Second Life the notion of the self as a social construction becomes literal. Avatars are complied from elements from the market place transforming identity into commodity.
RMB City, as consumer commodity, goes further than the title. When first presented in galleries the show resembled a real-estate marketing campaign. The first show (installed before the city was built in Second Life) was composed of a white architectural model accompanied by a “fly-through” video of the space. These images were accompanied by text that highlighted the enthusiasm of the developing city. The viewers were asked to project themselves into the fantasy presented, in much the same way as housing development ads do in reality. As RMB City developed so did its gallery presentation. At the UCCA centre in Beijing, footage of the city in its half constructed state was played inside of a giant fiberglass mountain. In more recent exhibitions such as Utopia Matters at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin in January 2010, the set up was akin to an Ikea show room. The viewer’s ability to access RMB City from the home was highlighted through its bedroom set-up. This representation is a response to China’s current obsession with development and its sudden prominence on the world stage. I find myself attracted to the physical representations of RMB City more than the virtual version.
Much like the gap between the fantasy of marketing material and the reality of the physical space it represents, there is a disparity between the RMB city of the promotional video/model and the Second Life version. Promotional RMB City material has a highly rendered seductive quality. It wants the viewer to join the utopian world depicted. Once in Second Life however, the viewer cannot access the vision of the city as advertised. The fantastic clash of fantasy icons cannot be experienced all at once. The program will only load the architecture that is a few feet in front of the character at any given time. The landscape, ocean and sky beyond those few feet remain empty. As the viewer travels around the city, buildings pop into existence at a rate comparable to China’s development. The viewer will often have difficulty navigating the city as they run into a building when they thought they were heading toward empty space. In this way RMB City uses it virtual qualities to mirror the many forms of displacement in contemporary China. The difficulty in navigation mirrors the culture shock that millions have when moving from the country to the city.
