亚洲一号

Cao Fei’s multimedia installation Asia One (2018) centers on a fictional film of the same name and depicts some of China’s most advanced industrial facilities, including the world’s first fully automated sorting center, in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province. The film follows the only two human employees at a gigantic sorting center, which is replete with sleek infrastructure, speedy robots, and constantly flowing stock, but otherwise eerily empty. At first, the employees appear to be closer to the machines and robots around them than they are to each other, but a bond develops between the two after they begin to rebel against the pristine efficiency, predictability, and orderliness of their surroundings. Skipping between time periods, the film is interspersed with scenes of visitors from the future who inspect the now-defunct facility, and a surreal sequence in which a group of workers, dressed to evoke the characters of Cultural Revolution–era model operas, dance to synth-driven disco music under a banner that proclaims, “Humans and machines, hand in hand.”