“An Archivist's Fantasy Gone Mad”: The Age of Exhibition in Cao Fei's Posthuman Trilogy

This paper argues that in her recent films, the Chinese artist-filmmaker Cao Fei (曹斐, b. 1978) shows how the futility of art and technologies of exhibition is linked to the danger of overexposure to images without context, and the numbing of public consciousness. In the twenty-first century, the fear of forgetting seems increasingly obsolete in the face of social media tools like Facebook's “See Your Memories: Never Miss a Memory” feature, which excavates photos uploaded, shared, or tagged on the site years ago, reminding users to “look back” on otherwise lost memories. However, in recent Chinese fiction (Ma Jian's Beijing Coma; Chan Koonchung's The Fat Years; Liu Cixin's “The Weight of Memories”), the trope of dormant memories remains noticeably prevalent, reflecting an urgent cultural concern about the conscious “act of deleting memories” (Yan Lianke) in the process of recording modern Chinese history. Whether in the form of documentary-style animation (i.Mirror, 2007), zombie-horror film (Haze and Fog, 2013), or stop-motion train-replica dioramas (La Town, 2014), Cao Fei fantasizes about a new posthuman consciousness, whose most serious trespass against humanity is not forgetting, but rather not feeling. Presenting disjointed scenes that call upon instances of trauma and surveillance, Cao's “posthuman trilogy” films suggest that when cosmopolitan memories become decontextualized, mere images no longer possess any meaningful symbolic power. Further, Cao's films demonstrate that voyeurism becomes an unavoidable yet inconsequential daily practice in the digital age of exhibition.