Migrant workers and the imaging of human infrastructure in Chinese contemporary art

Abstract

The focus on Beijing’s speed of development and the concomitant fascination with the unchecked destruction of hutongs reveal only part of Beijing’s urban story. If we consider that migrant workers (农民工) are the ‘human infrastructure’ that enables the built infrastructure, then grappling with how contemporary artists depict, exploit, and represent this human infrastructure uncovers many previously overlooked stakeholders. Artists reflect, recombine, and reimagine the figure of the migrant worker. However, such artistic interventions, while a critical avenue for addressing the contested citizenship of urban dwellers, are only one facet of the complex visual field of Beijing. Therefore, in addition to these artists’ works, I discuss other visual elements of Beijing such as the scrawled phone numbers advertising a variety of services for migrant workers on the surfaces of Beijing’s built environment. This unsigned public calligraphic practice is considered alongside the art of globally recognized artists to probe the interconnectedness of urban visual practices, question the targeted constituencies, and examine their reception by a range of urban audiences, revealing the communicative potential of images and text in the urban context and questioning what is at stake for the networks of migrant workers in Beijing that are often invisible.

Keywords

migrant workers Beijing contemporary art public calligraphy urban dwellers human infrastructure

The worker is a perennial topic for artists in the People’s Republic of China, one that is tightly coupled with the Communist Revolution, ideological culture work, and the nation-building projects of the Maoist era (1949–1976).¹ In this article I focus on works by contemporary artists that grapple with the figure of the male migrant worker (农民工), a more specific category of worker demonstrating that while traces of migrant workers appear in art and in public spaces in Beijing, they are often overlooked, relegated to marginalization and invisibility.² The fraught relationship between artists and the question of how, and whether, to represent workers is my main concern; in so doing, I argue that the particular category of migrant workers in contemporary Beijing vacillates between high visibility and invisibility in the urban environment.³ These interventions range from insightful modes of critique to those that are exploitative and problematic, collapsing at the worst of times into what Allan Sekula, an artist, terms the ‘find-a-bum-school of concerned photography’.⁴ The conceptual range of this trend further reflects larger issues in contemporary Chinese society and its uneasy relationship with and to the migrant worker. The figure of the migrant worker is often used as a symbol in the domestic and international media and as a shorthand for China’s rapid urban transformation.⁵ The representation of migrant workers has become an index of urbanization. Unpicking the relationships between representation of migrant workers and the lived realities of this population group is fundamental to understanding why this population continues to represent the speed of China’s urbanization (often cast as positive by the government) while at the same time they live in a state of exception and exclusion in the same spaces they build.

It is not always clear how artists should represent a worker, or even who is classified as a worker. It seemed clear enough in 1942 when Mao decreed that art should serve the people.⁶ According to Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, workers were ‘part of the triumvirate of red class excellence, gongnongbing (workers, peasant-farmers, soldiers). Poster art revered them.’⁷ The reverence and status of the worker in art-making began to come to an end following the economic and social reforms begun by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s.⁸ Now, in the current post-socialist moment of urban planning and market reforms, the migrant population is a necessary aspect of urbanization and the state’s ability to maintain the rapid rate of urban growth. The uneasy and at times outright illegal existence of migrants in cities underscores how difficult the state finds it to manage this category of the population.⁹ The 1977 economic and political transitions created new opportunities for artists, but also made the worker a difficult subject to address. The manual labourer, now a fixture of urban centres, was no longer a heroic worker, who was key to the revolution. Instead, the migrant worker has transformed into a semi-tolerated outsider (外地人).

Luo Zhongli’s (born 1948) huge oil painting Father (父亲) (1980) polarized the Chinese art world despite being selected for inclusion in a national art exhibition, demonstrating how a seemingly Mao-approved subject – the worker-peasant – can elicit a range of responses. From the cover of the 1981 January issue of Art (美术) to the protracted discussion in articles and responses in the journal, the artistic community has shown divergent reactions to the painting.¹⁰ The large-scale close-up of a man’s face captured in photographic detail makes clear the hard life of peasants. Ideologically, the painting seems to work within the framework of Maoist thought as outlined in the 1942 Talks at Yan’an conference on literature and art¹¹ – lauding and elevating the lowly worker-farmer to the status of leader or icon. Yet, as the government pushed for the Four Modernizations and Reforms and Opening Up, Father seemed to be decidedly unmodern to critics – despite the modern ballpoint pen behind his ear.¹² Father is the beginning of a genealogy of antagonism as it relates to representations of workers, and sets the contested stage for the next 40 years of artistic engagement with migrant worker subjects.¹³

The painting Father foreshadows the discussions and critiques of contemporary works by Zhu Fadong (born 1960), Zhang Huan (born 1965), Song Dong (born 1966), and Lu Hao (born 1969) that are my focus in this article. The new spaces of spectacle are predicated on the labouring bodies of migrant workers who are separated from the lived spaces of the city. They are concealed behind tall construction walls, or ‘hoardings’.¹⁴ Despite being the workforce that enables the skyline of Beijing to be punctuated by world-renowned buildings such as Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Tower, migrant workers occupy a tenuous, dangerous subject position.

Considering what made Father such a problematic work is illuminating for discussions of more recent work concerning the trope of migrant workers. In Father, in which the peasant is iconographically identifiable by his head covering, the darkness of his skin, and the background of the painting depicting terraced fields, Luo chose to portray a humble peasant at a scale that was, until then, reserved for only Mao. In this way, Father appropriated the scale of representation tacitly reserved for national leaders. While economic reforms had just started to take hold, and it would be more than a decade before Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour that solidified China’s post-socialist course of reform, the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 1978 had already begun establishing the special economic zones that would rapidly transform China from a predominantly centrally planned agrarian economy to a global manufacturing centre. ¹⁵ It is in this context that the ambivalent reception to Father has to be considered. And while the man in the painting is in a rural setting, he can metaphorically be read as the father to the migrant workers who began to seek economic opportunities off the land and in the special economic zones and cities such as Beijing. Father is thus a fitting example of this pivotal moment where the (soon-to-be migrant) peasant-turned-worker becomes a trope in contemporary art-making.

Migrant artists

The range of artistic expressions of the 1980s — such as ‘85 New Wave, Native Soil, and New Realism – demonstrates an array of stylistic possibilities explored by artists.¹⁶ Culture fever characterized this decade that was encouraged by newly available translations, opportunities that came with a return to a normal schedule of university entrance exams, and greater cultural and artistic freedoms.¹⁷ Luo came to paint Father through his observations of a farmer who stood guard over a public latrine, guarding the night soil from other farmers eager to steal this valuable resource for themselves.¹⁸ Beijing-based curator Karen Smith elucidates the link between migrant workers and contemporary art practices.¹⁹ She goes on to discuss the interrelated histories of artists, many of whom were also migrants to Beijing, and migrant workers. As these artists coalesced into a discernible group, one that was made up of both academic artists as well as artists working outside the academy, their relationship to social problems and issues was an optimistic one.²⁰ Many artists felt that it was possible, and indeed necessary, for art to function as part of society.²¹ This rationale was quickly dispelled after two events in 1989: the shuttering of the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition (中国现代艺术展 at the National Museum of Art in February, and the June crackdown on student protesters at Tiananmen.²² The artistic idealism of the 1980s was over. The artistic environment in Beijing in the following decade was markedly more cynical and less optimistic about how cultural producers could influence society.

The influence of economic reforms is directly related to the emergence of artist communities in Beijing. Smith traces the first artist commune of Yuanmingyuan, named for its proximity to the Old Summer Palace. It was here that unexpected associations emerged among economic reforms, migrants, and artists: the peasants who had built simple houses had left the area to work in factories where they were provided housing.²³ This left empty rooms that artists rented because they were cheap and available.²⁴ These were fringe communities: in both the spatial and conceptual sense. They existed in peripheral parts of Beijing, allowing artists living there to evade overbearing government supervision and censorship.

On the opposite edge of the city another artist village was taking shape. The existence of Beijing East Village (1993–1995) in the emerging avant-garde art community overlapped and intersected with historically important moments in recent Chinese history.²⁵ After 1992 artists no longer needed a membership to the Chinese Art Association in order to exhibit; in 1993 the first Chinese artists were included in the Venice Biennale; in 1994 the first national law on labour relations was approved; and in 1995 migrant workers without proper residency papers were forced to leave the capital.²⁶ These historical shifts fundamentally changed the role of artists in post-socialist society in Beijing.

Selling bodies, selling art

The 1990s were a period of economic changes and growing global attention to art from China. A discernible trend emerged: migrant workers became a trope, medium, and collaborators in many artists’ practices. Two works – This Person Is for Sale, Price Is Negotiable (此人出售, 价格面议) by Zhu Fadong (Figure 1) and To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (为鱼塘增高水位) (Figure 2) by Zhang Huan – are indicative of new methods developing in the art world of the 1990s related to the topos of migrant workers.

Figure 1.

Zhu Fadong, This Person Is for Sale (此人出售), 1994. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2.

Zhang Huan, To Raise the Level in a Fishpond (为鱼塘增高水位), 1997, Performance, Beijing. Image courtesy of the artist.

The selling of one’s physical labour is often overlooked in the official narrative of China’s post-socialist urbanization, particularly because it calls into question the central government’s investment in Marxist state ideology, while also pursuing policies of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.²⁷ Large-scale internal migration for economic opportunities in urban areas created large quantities of surplus labour, marking the failure of Mao’s peasant project. The transactional relationship between migrant workers and the construction sector fundamentally underpins Beijing’s urban transformation; however, the visibility of this transaction is mostly obscured. In contrast, Zhu’s performance This Person Is for Sale, Price Is Negotiable seeks to remedy this invisibility by exposing the economic relationship and exchanges.²⁸ In the opening intertitles in the video which was produced by the Smart Museum, Chicago, in tandem with the performance, Zhu describes the ‘floating population’ that migrated to urban centres because of economic reforms and opportunities for making money.²⁹ Dorothy Solinger characterizes the urban citizen’s conception of the floating population as ‘unrooted noncitizens, wanderers’.³⁰ Despite this characterization of migrants, Zhu declares, ‘I am one of them.’³¹ His blunt assertion of a shared identity is another point of intersection of migrant workers and contemporary artists. As discussed earlier, there are links between contemporary artists with fringe locations in Beijing that provided cheap rent and less official scrutiny, both elements that artists and migrant workers sought in the capital. Zhu exemplifies this overlapping of two populations, this shared spatiality and identity. At the same time he actively declares his belonging to the floating population and the art world.³²

Regardless of the social and cultural distinctions, Zhu accepts being labelled as a member of the floating population which he also identifies with.³³ In fact, Zhu had himself migrated multiple times from Yunnan to Haikou, a special economic zone, eventually moving to Beijing in search of economic opportunities.³⁴ Zhu’s adoption of the identity of a migrant is confirmed by his biography and it is not just an identity he was performing for this piece. This distinction is important because the social stigma and prejudices faced by migrants were and still are strong in Beijing. Donald explains:

But for Beijingers in 1998, and even today, the sight of a scruffy migrant worker on a bus, or jostling with thousands of others to get a mainline train home at Spring Festival, is an excrescence of the market, a necessary but hardly welcome temporary addition to the urban landscape. S/he speaks with the wrong accent, s/he doesn’t belong in the laneways, or in the new high-rises that have taken the place of many of them in the past ten years, and significantly, s/he reminds the aspirational middle class (zhongchan jieji) that class divisions, until the late 1970s the preserve of Maoist categories and critiques, are now visible as haves and have-nots, as locals and outsiders.³⁵

It is in this context of exclusion that Zhu’s transactional performance has to be understood. Zhu’s choice to identify with the ‘visible have-nots’ demonstrates his awareness of the social changes taking place in urban centres in the mid-1990s.

Three specific locations help to further illustrate how Zhu’s performance can be integrated into the larger genealogy of works on migrant workers I am developing: the first is at Tiananmen Square with a shot of Zhu from behind; the second is a construction site which Zhu is entering; and the last is outside of McDonald’s on the southern end of Wangfujing Street. In these three public spaces, Zhu’s expendability is contrasted and constructed in concert with politically, socially, and commercially layered spaces of Beijing’s geography. As Wu Hung and Yomi Braester, among others, have articulated, Tiananmen is China’s preeminent space of state spectacle.³⁶ The square is constructed and constituted by a mandate of state visibility: it shows itself to visitors while at the same time monitoring those visitors through cameras, guards, and plain-clothes policemen. Zhu’s intervention is his constant reference to making visible the transactability of his body. Occupying a space of high visibility, he stands wearing a jacket with a written text sewn on the back of his jacket that reads: This person is for sale | Price is negotiable. Zhu’s gesture is politically daring, albeit subtle, because it reveals the unspoken but fundamental reason for migrants to move to cities: an economic transaction. Migrants are in the city to sell their labour that is worth more in the urban market even in the heart of the nation which has policies discouraging migrants from leaving rural areas, in the form of discriminatory residency laws, and threats of police raids on migrant communities in Beijing.

The second location is the sequence where Zhu, turning off a main road choked with traffic, enters a demolition site.³⁷ In the background are half-finished apartment blocks, with two cranes standing like guards on either side. Zhu is filmed from behind, making the text on his back clearly visible to the audience. This makes the underlying concept of the work patently clear: the migrant workers who demolished the houses, who are operating the cranes, and who are building the new apartments are for sale, their labour was purchased to undertake this work of ‘urbanizing’ this section of Beijing. The bitter irony of this section of the performance is Zhu’s collection of Mao badges – acting in this piece as memorial totems of an era that lauded the worker and promised the security of a lifetime iron rice bowl – pinned on the front of his jacket. As he turns towards the camera we see the red glow of the badges framed in a low-angle shot. The low angle makes Zhu’s body appear bigger, blocking out the surroundings. This can be read as a fleeting compositional nod to socialist realism where low angles that were used forced audiences to look up in reverence to oversized, working bodies. But Zhu is not the model worker of propaganda posters, he is a migrant worker – ‘one of them’ – no longer the vanguard of revolution, instead a body exploited for labour, a body for sale.

The flat open space of Tiananmen is designed to provide high visibility and long-distance vantage points in order to regulate how the space is used. The high visibility and publicness of Tiananmen Square is echoed compositionally in the second location. The cropping of the shot highlights Zhu as the only person in a field of demolished housing. The half-destroyed buildings in the background lend a sense of ruination and desolation to the sequence. The orderliness of Tiananmen contrasts with the disorderly heaps of bricks and mounds of dirt in this sequence, but the insertion of Zhu’s body into this space, in this empty no-man’s land, serves to make him seen. The bold declaration in red characters – ‘This person is for sale’ – on Zhu’s back stands out against the dun-coloured demolition site. The juxtaposition of Zhu’s moving body entering and wandering through this space serves to make his statement visible within the context of demolition that was likely being done by other migrant workers. By inserting his body into spaces where migrants work and into the political spectacle space of Tiananmen, Zhu comments on the variety of spaces in Beijing in which migrant workers move and encode through those very movements.³⁸

A last location that shows the concepts of transactability and visibility embedded in the performance is the southern end of Wangfujing Street near where it intersects with Chang’an Street East.³⁹ Historically, transaction is embedded in the function of the intersection of Chang’an and Wangfujing streets. Zhu’s choice of location is again apt: Wangfujing is a place with historic links to commerce; the Dong’an market was being revived at the time. In 1992 the world’s largest McDonald’s opened on Wangfujing Street, which was also the future site of the Hong Kong-funded mega mall and development complex Oriental Plaza.⁴⁰ In 1994 the Central Academy of Fine Arts was moved to make way for development, prompting ‘an outcry … from Beijing’s many artists and intellectuals, to whom the forthcoming demolition of the academy would symbolize the complete defeat of art and education under the invasion of a market economy’.⁴¹ Offering his body for sale in a space fraught with tensions between global capital flows, art-making, and state structures such as the Central Academy of Fine Arts emphasizes Zhu’s gesture of bringing to focus the transactions happening along this street every minute.

Zhang Huan’s performance To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond stands in contrast to Zhu Fadong’s performance where he overtly identified himself as a migrant.⁴² Zhang Huan’s work was his contribution to Wildlife (野生), a multisite exhibition curated by fellow artist Song Dong.⁴³ Zhang Huan’s piece also took place in Beijing. Rather than moving through the built environment of the centre of the city, instead Zhang – along with 40 migrant workers – stood still, occupying a muddy pond on the edge of the city, their bodies displacing water and thus raising the overall water level of the pond.⁴⁴ The peri-urban setting is indicated by the green space, but looming apartment towers in the background of the photograph recall the ‘fringeness’ of migrants in contemporary Chinese society.⁴⁵ Despite being intimately involved in every aspect of urban life, migrant workers live in states of exception in regard to the government and social perceptions.

This integration of migrants while still living in a social limbo is echoed in Gu Chengfeng’s characterization of migrant workers in his essay ‘From main characters to spectators’ (从主人公到看客). Gu uses the term ‘marginalized people’ (边缘人) to describe migrant workers. ‘These migrant workers who have “left the land, and the countryside” for the city clearly have the traits of [being a] “marginalized people”.’⁴⁶ The juxtaposition between the full integration of migrant workers into the complex urban ecology and Gu’s assertion that they are marginalized people should be brought to bear on Zhang Huan’s performance.

Displacing agency

Displacement is evoked subtly in both Zhu Fadong’s and Zhang Huan’s pieces. Both create a sense of unease, even alienation. On the one hand, Zhu’s agency in his work is undoubted: he is selling himself for a price that is negotiable. On the other hand, in Zhang Huan’s performance the agency of the participants is denied. They are rendered voiceless through his artistic choices: they are neither named as individuals in the work’s title, nor is it clear from the documentation that they were compensated for their work. Moreover, because he asserts his authorship of this image, he retains his individual subjectivity. By doing this, he denies the subjectivity of the other participants in the performance, and objectifies them. Instead of reading them as individuals, the men in the pond become objects of the audience’s gaze.

Discussions of this work have analysed the futility of raising the water level in the fish pond as it relates to the marginalized status of migrant workers in China. This perpetuates and sublimates the act of objectification taking place within the performance. In regarding the gesture of Zhang Huan’s performance, the audience is not implicated in the larger systems that have resulted in the surplus of migrant workers available as labourers. As the audience, we further participate in the objectification of the migrant workers in looking at the image because it provokes an emotional response. We do not know who these men are. We consume the performance, but we are not explicitly implicated or forced to acknowledge our participation in the objectification. We do know who Zhang Huan is. The displacement of the water due to the introduction of the bodies is the result of simple fluid mechanics, yet the resulting waves of this performance were enormous for Zhang Huan’s career as he was propelled into global prominence. Therefore, we have to consider that this work does two things: it makes visible the marginal status of migrants, but in that same moment it is also exploitative of this marginality.

The provocation of emotion is what affective labour is designed to do. Categorizing this performance as affective labour is helpful in understanding how we might conceive it as at once revealing and exploitative of migrant workers.⁴⁷ For Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt affective labour is ‘immaterial even if it is corporeal’; thus, despite Zhang Huan’s use of his body and the bodies of others, the resulting ‘product’ is that of an image.⁴⁸ Winnie Wong, in her study of the painting village of Dafen – known for copies of Western masterpieces – articulates the distinction between global contemporary artists and the Dafen painting labourers. She states:

generating new forms of immaterial labor in every conceivable way, the contemporary artist thus functions as a middleman in the stratified world of global artistic labor….This mobility, so distinct from the subaltern’s unfree labor – captured by the censorious state or the factory regime – is crucial to the imagination of a ‘global contemporary.’⁴⁹

Following Wong’s formulation we can consider Zhang Huan to be the middleman who captures the unfree labour of the migrant workers through their participation in the performance. The performance illustrates the lack of agency or voice of the migrant workers, thus revealing their subaltern subjectivity. The collective action of the performance does little to dispel notions of biopower as conceptualized by the state and as famously articulated by Michel Foucault as the subjugation of citizens through techniques of population monitoring and control.⁵⁰

The immaterial labour of Zhang Huan’s work is in line with government policies that are designed to move China from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.⁵¹ In her study of propaganda and its relationship to information and communications technology, Anne-Marie Brady clarifies China’s economic shift away from ‘a product-based, labor intensive economy to one based on information and technology’.⁵² The government’s desire to move the economy from labour-intensive to information and technology cloaks the physical working bodies still so crucial to production. Many artists are occupied with making visible the bodies still very much involved in a product-based economy. While the Chinese government would like to shift to a tertiary economy, for example, by building high-tech zones and financial hubs, the evidence in Beijing points to a continued existence of a large-scale manual labour workforce, still rooted in the physical body, very much based on selling labour, not information- or technology-based skills.

An illustrative counterexample to Zhu Fadong’s and Zhang Huan’s works is Santiago Sierra’s 250 cm Line Tattooed on 6 Paid People (1999).⁵³ Sierra hired six unemployed men and paid them in exchange for allowing him to tattoo a line across their backs and to record the event. Sierra, like Zhu, immediately implicates the viewer in the economic exchange in the form of bodies for sale that is the pivot of the two works. Sierra and Zhu make apparent the relationships between the bodies of labourers and the selling of their bodies in the market. The men in Sierra’s piece will forever bear the line they were paid to have inscribed on their body, providing a constant reminder of the capitalist system that exploits the worker’s body for whatever ends that produce maximum profitability. This recalls Marx’s formulation of the process of capitalist accumulation:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army…. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour.⁵⁴

Zhu Fadong, Santiago Sierra, and Zhang Huan all use bodies as the raw material of their works. However, in Zhang Huan’s performance, neither in the title, nor in the artist’s statement, is the economics of exchange in the piece made evident. In contrast, Zhu and Sierra directly implicate the viewer in the critique of the capitalist system by forcing us to see these bodies just as a source of labour, as commodities that can be purchased in exchange for money. In Zhang Huan’s work the labour of the participants goes unpaid or at least unacknowledged – the migrant workers are only described collectively, never as individual subjects – the mechanics of the economic exchange remain obscured and therefore unexamined and accepting of a system where bodies are available for nothing more than the cost of their labour.

In To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, the precarious marginalized position of these migrant workers in Chinese society is used by Zhang Huan not as a way for him to show his solidarity to this population, although this has often been the analysis of the work, but as a launching pad for his artistic career. The vulnerability of the men’s naked chests and their befuddled glances at the camera illustrate the shift Gu Chengfeng describes as the transition of migrant workers from main characters to spectators.⁵⁵ The once heroic bodies of workers that populated propaganda posters are replaced with the skinny, concave chests and the impassive stares of these unacknowledged migrant workers.

Within the realm of contemporary visual production the now unstable category of worker is being rethought and reimagined. The neo-liberal market’s disregard of individual labouring bodies as well as its rapacious consumption of labour now dictate how workers are represented. Although the actual physical work being done and represented has stayed the same – building the nation through large-scale infrastructure projects – the worker-as-migrant is no longer imbued with a rosy ideological glow. The representation of the worker has transitioned from highly visible, central to image-making that portrayed the government’s philosophy, to the contemporary moment where attempts are made to make migrants invisible, unacknowledged for the dirty, dangerous, and difficult (the 3Ds) jobs they fill, and often castigated as undesirable.⁵⁶ And when migrant workers are acknowledged, as in an article from China Today, the emphasis is on the quantity, the statistics, never on their individuality as citizens.⁵⁷ By using data and statistics as the main descriptors of this population, in the eyes of the state, migrant workers are converted from individuals to a ‘global mass’ in order to control them.⁵⁸ The statistical characterization of migrant workers serves to separate this population, partitioning it off from other social categories and thereby creating a form of internal othering, confirming the status of migrant workers as marginalized people. However, despite the desire of the government to define this population, Zhang Huan’s fish pond piece demonstrates the blurring of social boundaries and the evolving shared and overlapping spatialities of Beijing between various actors: artists, migrant workers, and urban citizens. His work is exploitative of the migrant workers in the performance; however the piece does underscore the spatial integration taking place between different communities in Beijing.⁵⁹ The complex relationship between migrant workers and urbanites is one of constant negotiations of inclusion and exclusion, need and rejection, visibility and invisibility.

People as infrastructure: ‘Together with Migrants’

This colliding and perhaps eventual collusion can be viewed in terms of ‘people as infrastructure’ as formulated by AbdouMaliq Simone to describe the interactions and negotiations between various urban actors in public and private spaces of the city of Johannesburg.⁶⁰ Simone’s formulation, unlike the flattening of difference as in curator Yang Shinyi’s characterization of the similarities between migrant workers and artists, preserves the asymmetry of these relations, which I believe is crucial to constructing new readings of this genre of contemporary art.

An example of people as infrastructure is UNESCO’s multi-year research project ‘Together with Migrants’. This project comprised an art exhibition at the Today Art Museum in 2003, a second show at Jianwai SOHO in 2006, and research on issues related to migrants by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.⁶¹

‘Together with Migrants’ is the first contemporary art exhibition focusing on ‘Mingongs’, i.e. migrant workers in China, addressing migrant workers and their related social and cultural issues from 1999 to 2003. This is the first opportunity for many Mingong-related works, long renowned in the Chinese art community, to be viewed by the public.⁶²

Selected as the cover image for the final UNESCO report, 100% (Figure 3) by the artist Wang Jin (born 1962) exemplifies Simone’s notion of people as infrastructure and, moreover, it makes migrant workers visible within a public space of Beijing.⁶³ In the photograph the outstretched arms of the top row of men brace the concrete beam on the underside of an overpass in Beijing’s Chaoyang district. By reinserting the bodies of workers back into the space of the underpass, Wang makes visible the labour that built the overpass. The dynamic line of the highway contrasts with the stillness of the men. Their shoes and clothing suggest they are migrant workers: most of them wear cheap canvas shoes and nondescript pants and shirts, and none of them wears a wristwatch, which is still considered a marker of material wealth. The muted tones of the photograph, dusty even, provoke thoughts of Beijing’s spring sandstorms, or the smog that now often envelops the city.⁶⁴ The social commentary of 40 men attempting to hold up something as mammoth as an overpass is incisive.

Figure 3.

Wang Jin, 100%, 1999. Copyright Wang Jin. Image courtesy of Pékin Fine Arts.

The choice of location, underneath an elevated highway, is also important for a nuanced reading of the work. Until the mid-1980s Beijing, being notoriously flat (often called a ‘big pancake’ (大饼) by urban historians),⁶⁵ had few overpasses or flyovers.⁶⁶ In 1999 the still relatively newly created space under overpasses added a layer of meaning to 100%, indicating new urban forms – overpasses – and new ways of being in relation to those forms – staging performance art.

The everydayness of the men’s clothing throws into relief the strangeness of their actions. Perhaps as futile as Zhang Huan trying to raise the level in a pond, ultimately Wang Jin’s gesture shares conceptual similarities with Zhu Fadong’s work. Wang does not make clear that he paid the workers. However, by placing bodies in a space and in work positions, regardless of the pointlessness of this work, it implicates us in the circuits of exchange that create opportunities for workers to have to hold up roads. Whereas standing in the fish pond segregated the migrant workers from a logical space or action of work, the space of the overpass underscores Wang’s interest in the relationship between people and architecture. Wang describes his interest in people, architecture, and the relationship evident in 100%:

[In] 1998, I had some thoughts regarding people and architecture, and the connection between people and architecture … This sort of topic … In that way, it is the migrant worker [who] has the most intimate relationship with architecture.⁶⁷

Wang explicitly connects the migrant worker to architecture. In contrast, for Zhang Huan the decontextualization of migrant workers functions to provoke the effect of displacement, but for Wang Jin, maintaining the visual relationship of migrant workers’ bodies to architecture is crucial.

The body politics of construction is also evident in Song Dong’s contribution. This work included 200 migrant workers positioned in various locations throughout the art gallery: in the elevator, the hallway, and the main exhibition space.⁶⁸ Whereas Wang Jin’s intervention was to reinsert bodies into finished constructions, Song Dong inserted migrant workers into the white cube space of the art gallery. Song quotes Mao’s notion of ‘countryside surrounds the city’ to highlight the inequalities he observes in contemporary society.⁶⁹ Song’s intervention is to reterritorialize the gallery space with the bodies of the workers in much the same way that Wang has done with the space under the overpass.

Song used 200 migrant workers in his performance. The focus on quantities is reminiscent of the frequently cited statistics concerning migrant workers. In fact, in his artist’s statement Song cites 120 million – his estimation of the migrant worker population. These statistical representations occlude in their sheer size the various individual voices of migrant workers. This recalls Foucault’s notion of ‘massifying’, where individuals are denied agency by the state.⁷⁰ Song’s performance is critical of this process of massifying in that he forces the audience to confront individual bodies, individual members of the migrant worker class face-to-face rather than through nameless statistics.⁷¹ This is particularly the case in the elevator portion of the work where Song had seven migrant workers ride the elevator which could carry a maximum of 13 people. The small, enclosed space of the elevator serves to heighten the physical proximity between the seven migrant workers and six other people. Song describes this move as creating a minority out of the exhibition attendees.⁷² Migrant workers and urban residents interact frequently, but their interaction could be characterized as being party to massifying rather than a one-on-one experience; however, the space of the elevator forces such interaction to be acknowledged, to be seen, and to be experienced at the level of individuals, not as a statistic.

Numbers and migrant workers are another point of comparison between Wang Jin and Song Dong’s practices. In Zhang Kangkang’s discussion of Wang Jin’s work 100%, he states: ‘In those days, other than numbers, he [Wang Jin] saw nothing else.’⁷³ Zhang Kangkang attributes Wang’s fascination with numbers in part to the new millennium and the world population reaching six billion. Therefore, in conjunction with Wang’s interest in migrant workers, it is plausible that numbers and migrant workers are linked in his practice as they are in Song’s.

Numerical articulations of migrant workers

Many other artists, such as Zhang Dali and Liu Xiaodong in particular, have taken note of the scale of migrant workers working in cities and incorporated these issues into their practice.⁷⁴ But here I shift from a discussion of art to the strings of numbers scrawled across the roads, pavements, and streets of Beijing. Michael Taussig in his study on acts of defacement has theorized about the ‘public secret’ – ‘that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated’.⁷⁵ In Beijing one public secret is the uncertain, semi-illegal status of migrant workers. Despite their hyper-visibility and the spatial integration in the urban, migrant workers remain a public secret. The inscriptions of multitudes of phone numbers visible on almost every imaginable surface in Beijing are, I suggest, a starting place from which to trace this public secret.

In Beijing one is visually accosted by numerical graffiti – strings of numbers which are phone numbers that function as advertisements for services to produce faked documents and certifications, predominantly aimed at migrant workers.⁷⁶ The demand for such services demonstrates the need to legitimate the status of migrants in the city, and the abundance of phone numbers concretizes Beijing’s estimated seven million migrant workers. These strings of numbers, many of which are accompanied with the characters 办证 ([help with] obtaining certification), inundate public spaces, sidewalks, billboards, overpasses, telephone booths, and streets (Figure 4). Migrant workers from rural areas working in urban centres are often caught in a double bind. While they constitute a vast cheap manual abour force, residual socialist era residency laws exclude them from social services available to urban residency holders. Aihwa Ong describes the ambiguous status of migrants as ‘states of exception’.⁷⁷ The advertisements make these states of exception visible.

Figure 4.

Beijing sidewalk with advertisements for obtaining certificates, 2012. Photograph by author.

Inscription is not just the purview of the urban visual field, but contemporary artists also use inscriptions as a tactic to grapple with the processes of urbanization and communication. Qiu Zhijie’s piece Copying Lanting Xu 1000 Times (重复书写兰亭序一千遍) (1990–95) grapples with the failure to communicate meaning through repeated inscribing of text on one sheet of paper.⁷⁸ Eventually the entire sheet of paper is black with ink, obscuring any legible text. The futility of copying something 1000 times on one piece of paper recalls the constant battle in the public spaces of Beijing between the writers of the phone numbers and the city works crews that work to remove the numbers (Figure 5). In the act of making something difficult to read, even difficult to see, we become more attuned to what is being covered up.⁷⁹

Figure 5.

Beijing phone booth with advertisements for fake certificates, 2012. Photograph by author.

Government-sponsored programmes to remove small advertisements often target people who have been caught posting or writing these advertisements.⁸⁰ However, attempts to remove the numbers in order to restore the space often do not obscure the strings of numbers. The layers of writing and removal serve to mark a contested public space inscribing the various actors seeking to use the space. The territorializing of space to use as advertisement and the reterritorializing of the space by the state through clean-up campaigns can be read as a metaphor for the ongoing negotiations between migrant workers, the state, and the market. This is the public secret the phone numbers reveal – the secret of the need for migrant workers, while at the same time denying them full rights to urban citizenship, and therefore condemning them to a state of exception within the urban sphere.⁸¹ The public secret is ‘knowing what not to know’.⁸² Through the act of covering the phone numbers, migrants’ states of exception remain a public secret.⁸³

Yen Yuehping terms public inscriptions ‘public calligraphy’ (题字).⁸⁴ According to Yen, examples of public calligraphy include Mao’s calligraphy on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, and the masthead of the People’s Daily (人民日报). The connection between power and public calligraphy is an important one. The role and power of the written word in Chinese statecraft dates back to before 1949, and it continues today: ‘Political orders and communications did not just appear primarily as written texts, they had to be written in the author’s original calligraphy as well.’⁸⁵

Viewing public calligraphy as an inscription is illuminating in terms of how power is communicated and immortalized through the gestural act of calligraphy. In contrast to the writing of phone numbers, regarded as a public nuisance and even an ‘illness’, calligraphy by those in power is both welcomed and expected. Yet this agonistic relationship between those in power and those with little power, both of whom write in public, is indicative of the urban condition in China. Careful examination of the numbers, particularly those that use paint, reveals the flowing gestural motion of the writer’s body. The need to write quickly is predicated on the fear of being caught by the authorities, which causes the scrawled appearance of the numbers. As the numbers and characters flow together with loops of paint still visibly connecting them, the viewer sees in those marks the hand of the painter – the trace of the gesture, the sign of the individual. Mao’s distinctive calligraphy marks well-known spaces and monuments, thereby connecting him as an individual to those places; in this way his power over those spaces is inscribed physically and metaphorically. In contrast, the unknown, unnamed writers of the small advertisements, while also inscribing spaces, remain weak in relation to the power of the state.

A final example illustrates the precarious position of migrant workers: A Grain of Sand (一粒沙) by Lu Hao. Lu’s piece is a micro carving of text of a basic biography of a migrant worker killed by his boss for asking for his pay.⁸⁶ This is what is at stake when we see the numbers scrawled in the city. For migrant workers, urban living is often a matter of life and death. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an inscription is to trace ‘upon some hard substance for the sake of durability’. ⁸⁷ This is the rationale for Mao’s calligraphy being carved into stone; but we can also consider Lu’s gesture to be making durable the barest, the most pared down of biographies of a migrant worker. A Grain of Sand might then be considered public calligraphy, one that reflects back to society a bleak outlook of migrant workers. This work makes visible the man – the individual migrant worker who lost his life, rather than being cloaked by massification. Lu’s choice of material and the scale of the work reinforce the intention of the work. The miniature stature of the piece contrasts with the magnitude of the story it tells. Linking the worker’s biography to a material he likely worked with underscores the act of memorializing his life. While this work does not include the bodies of migrant workers, its absence shows the body more acutely. Moreover, the agency of the individual man is preserved.

A close inspection confirms the poor quality of the carving.⁸⁸ Although the characters are crude in form, they are legible. Their power to communicate is not concealed, just as the strings of numbers are not concealed. Both of these – art and visual culture – are evidence of the migrant workers’ experience in the dense urban environment of contemporary China. The traces of migrant workers in contemporary art are more difficult to decode than during high Maoism, but works such as those by Wang Jin, Song Dong, and Lu Hao give audiences new ways of conceptualizing the lived experience of this crucial segment of society. While the surplus of labour still feeds the neo-liberal marketplaces of contemporary China, being attuned to traces and inscriptions of the migrant workers continues to be pertinent. Critical understandings of human infrastructure should compel more rigorous inspections of the various stakeholders in China’s urban revolution. Fighting the invisibility of migrant workers through tactics such as performance and installation art maintains the artist’s function as a critical and illuminating voice in society.

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