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About

In One World One Dream, a dystopian vision is presented in spectacular new work by Cai Yuan and JJ Xi in the aftermath of the Beijing Olympics. The huge, scaled down model of an aircraft carrier confronts the viewer with a manifestation of the ultimate political aspiration: the military superpower. In the titling of the show, the work cites China’s ubiquitous slogan for the Olympics. It is also a literal citation of a US warship, of which the work is a small replica. A representation of brute metallic force, this is no less than a superpower status symbol, like a giant executive toy. This work is a dramatic evocation of the spectre of power itself. The cultural paradox which runs through much of the work of Cai and Xi, lies in ‘the fantasy of absolute power or presence – although it is in the nature of this fantasy that it can never be realised or fully acknowledged.’

The object of the aircraft carrier or ‘mother ship’ is brought to sit (heavily) in the gallery space at Tokyo Gallery (BTAP) in 798, a space itself established on the back of ammunitions factories built during the 1950s. A replica of one of America’s well-known vessels USS enterprise the sculpture is fifty times smaller than its real counterpart, yet at 7 metres long it is a work of industrial proportions. As such, we can see it as a statement of cultural as much as military power. Grounded on the gallery floor surrounded by walls, we are reminded of what it takes to make such an object and we are compelled to contemplate its meaning. Even in a confined space its physicality remains elusive and unattainable. We are only allowed to look, to view from a platform and to see its surfaces and appendages. Its large metallic presence emits a sense of otherness leaving us feeling removed.

A literal transposition of a feature of modern military capacity, this ‘thing’ poses questions about global aspiration, violence and the vying of powerful nations for superpower status in the world. A modern day monster of military might, it is created for defence and ultimately destruction. We are used to seeing this über-object on television screens in short film clips as part of the furniture of war, a vast flat surface from which little supersonic planes set off dramatically to wreak violence on others.

Translated from the Japanese for mother ship, in China, hangmu has had resonance in the public imaginary for a hundred years as the ultimate object of naval supremacy. As a conquerer of the seas and a guardian of territories the vessel relates to centuries of naval history between empires and now points to a critical moment in global power dynamics. In the Chinese context it signifies the possibility of a new balance of power, which perhaps is shortly in sight.

From this giant object, questions of capacity, weight and scale are posed in the never-ending quest for human scientific ‘progress’. Encompassing invisible borders drawn up between nations, the seas occupy a strange position as murky waters obscure the lines the (enemy) other is not allowed to cross. Aircraft carriers have a quasi glamorous status in naval terms. Moving slowly due their great weight, their vast surfaces allow tiny aero-dynamic military planes to take off suddenly rising at great speed on missions to wipe out an unseen enemy.

Cai and Xi’s work has often explored notions of the ‘real world’, and the absurdity of how it is bounded by preconceptions and perceived ‘order’ falsely imposed. In previous works they have stepped into the real world via intervention into the public realm during mass protests about globalisation and war. Here they reverse the process and move the notional ‘real’ into the bounded gallery space, exposing the gap between ‘culture’ and power, whereby ‘power resides in the intoxication of loss and not in the control or suppression of a pre-existing identity’. One World One Dream takes the post Olympics environment to toy with the notion of utopianism, collective national fantasy and its darker Other: the dream of destruction in ‘the modern concept and practice of warfare (and indeed of science) as violent struggle or combat with death’.

The communist capitalist combo that China embodies, is caught in its historical longing of ‘equality’ chasing the American dream in a perpetual love-hate relationship with the West. The ongoing powerful drive of China’s modernisation leaves vast areas of rubble in its wake. Building projects take place on a scale never witnessed before. New symbols of global status are spawned as international architects are brought in to facilitate the shaping of new skylines forming fabulous silhouettes in fantasy-style constructions. Newness became China’s obsession in the early twentieth century in the New Culture Movement and remains so today. In the Cultural Revolution the slogan was: Destroy the Old World, Create a New World as thousands of youth were called on to destroy feudalism, capitalism and revisionism. Now, newness has shifted onto a different plane led by China’s capacity to work. As Chinese manufacturing feeds the world’s consumers, new technologies are avidly taken up and new forms of global business practices streamline the circulation of goods around the world.

The aircraft carrier also carries within its own historical trajectory a transnational story of inventions, purchase, appropriations and competition. Japan, Russia, UK and the USA all feature in the aircraft carrier discourse that falls within a distinctly modern era of military violence. In this story, the aircraft carrier transforms from a simple air balloon carrying weapons in the early twentieth century to nuclear-capable supersonic structures of gargantuan proportions, weighing 100,000 tonnes and encompassing several football pitches in square metres.

This work, the aircraft carrier can be read as the object of the ‘fantasy of power’. The sentimental notion of the ‘dream come true’, encapsulated by the American ethos, can be seen as mirrored onto the highest level of governmental game-playing ‘which has to sustain itself as desire’. In the words of Maurice Blanchot, ‘a desire for the impossibility of desire, bearing the impossible, hiding it and revealing it, a desire that […] is the blow of the inaccessible, the surprise of the point that is reached only in so far as it is beyond reach, there where the proximity of the remote offers itself only in its remoteness.’

To move back to the work itself, it is simply an object in the gallery space, a sculpture and nothing else.

The exhibition is curated by Katie Hill, Director of the Office of Contemporary Chinese Art.