Glimpses of China's inner workings

Videos hint at young laborers' hopes and dreams

''Honey'' is one of two videos by Yang Fudong in ''Business As Usual'' at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

The Beijing Olympics have come and gone, and despite all the wall-to-wall television coverage, I'm not sure I have a clearer view of China than I did before the Games began. "Business As Usual: New Video From China," featuring the work of Cao Fei and Yang Fudong, now up at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, offers much more to chew on than the fluffy features about Chinese tumbling schools and monks who practice martial arts that aired during the Olympics.

Those were gauzy postcards home from bedazzled travelers. The three videos in "Business As Usual," organized by the Arizona State University Art Museum, are stoked with ambiguity, angst, and sometimes hope. Yang's two works, "Honey" and "City Lights," and Fei's triptych, "Whose Utopia," focus on young Chinese people divorced from tradition by a new economy, hard at work but emotionally adrift.

It's not that these people can't find themselves; in Yang's videos, at least, they don't even know to look. His is the bleaker view. "Honey," in particular, piquantly depicts an aimless though lushly beautiful roundelay in which a young woman garbed in fishnet stockings and fur stoles wanders the streets, smokes cigarettes, and plays cards with implacable young men in Mao suits. It's as if all the young men's sublimated sexual energy has burst forth in the form of this femme fatale to taunt them, and still they don't act.

Yang's camera comes in close, emphasizing faces and body parts, elevating the tension. Although his settings are contemporary, his female protagonist's costumes refer to early 20th-century Chinese film. There's something tender about the reference, a sense of how dramatically, and sometimes traumatically, China has changed in the last century.

The comic "City Lights" features two identically dressed young office workers; their suits and ties signify that they're part of China's new middle class. One carries an umbrella; the other, shadowing the first, mimes carrying an umbrella. They do the same with a pistol, and then again dancing with a woman to the loud strains of a bossa nova.

"City Lights" borrows the title of Charlie Chaplin's classic 1931 film, but the music, the pistol, and the neat suits here more closely conjure Sean Connery's James Bond. These guys don't handle a woman the way Bond does (or the way the Little Tramp captivated his love in "City Lights"), though. Like the fellows in "Honey," they are muffled and shackled by the roles they're expected to play.

The young people in Fei's ambitious yet sweetly humane "Whose Utopia" also lead scripted, regimented lives. They work at a light-bulb factory and live in dormitories on site. These industrial cities were erected under Deng Xiaoping, beginning in 1978. Many Chinese youth flocked to them to escape a predictable rural existence. What they got was a predictable industrial existence: long shifts doing menial, repetitive tasks.

Fei turns the factory into the backdrop for a fairy tale. Everyone has a dream, perhaps especially young people trapped in perennial drudgery, and in identifying the dreams of some of these workers, she saves them from faceless anonymity and restores their dignity.

Charlie Chaplin shows up obliquely in "Whose Utopia," too. The first part of Fei's three-part video, "Imagination of Product," focuses initially on the dance of the machinery of light-bulb production, recalling Chaplin's 1936 factory film, "Modern Times." Gradually, Fei introduces gloved hands sorting filaments and feet pumping pedals, and eventually we see entire people at work. She takes the viewer from manufacture through boxing, a graceful mechanical epic.

The heart of the video is its second part, "Factory Fairytale," in which individual workers act out their dreams on the factory floor: A man dances among the assembly benches, a ballet dancer pirouettes in wings and a tutu, a fellow strums his guitar. This passage ends mournfully, with a young woman gazing out of her dormitory window at rows and rows of other drab buildings.

Fei's final chapter, "My Future Is Not a Dream," features portraits of these people posing solemnly at work. An essay by co-curator Marilyn A. Zeitlin reveals that in China, even kings were not shown in portraits until the 18th century. Fei addresses a portion of China's national identity, its historical focus on the greater good over individual aspiration, and here gives faces to the faceless masses.

Yang's two moody, provocative videos ultimately describe a population of rootless, aimless youth for whom working as the engine of China's economy may not be enough. Fei's "Whose Utopia" manages to have it both ways: She lauds industry with her beautiful shots of light-bulb manufacture. She also reclaims the spirits of factory workers.