I visited the “Younger than Jesus” exhibition at the New Museum in New York City las week presenting the work of fifty artists from twenty-five countries — all of them younger than 33 years of age.
Among them, Cao Fei, a Chinese video artist, theater director, photographer and blogger, presented her COSplayers photo series of Chinese teenagers immersed in the world of Japanese manga to a point that they choose to romp around their hometowns dressed in elaborate customs of their favorite characters, and engage each other in ritual-like scene-reenaction. COSplay is a an entire subculture in Japan.
The stark contrast between Cosplayers’ fantasy world and the crude reality of the urban spaces where their playing takes place, is a metaphor of one of the most basic modern existential contradictions: the gap between our yearning for self-realization and our capacity to accomplish it, despite the enormous economic progress that global capitalism has provided us with.
As I have argued in a previous post, a common way of escaping this contradiction is to engage in destructive evasive behavior to temporarily aliviates the anxiety that it creates. But Cosplay strikes me as a rather constructive form of evasion, channeling the confusion and frustration of urban teens toward artistic expression. Hopefully Cosplay will infuse them with the manga-warrior-courage and creativeness that it will take to follow their dreams and true passions later on life, and break away from the soul-crushing jobs that many of them have to endure today.
Also dealing with the disparity of dreams and reality, I found this segment of “Whose Utopia?”, a good example of Cao Fei’s video work:
