Cao Fei's Whose Utopia is easy to misread if it is summarized only as a video about factory workers. That description is true, but too flat. The work was made in 2006 at the OSRAM lighting factory in Foshan, inside the Pearl River Delta manufacturing world that helped make China's export boom visible to consumers elsewhere.[2][3] Its subject is not simply labor, and it is not simply fantasy. Its sharper question is what happens when private ambition enters a workplace built to convert bodies, time, glass, metal, and repetition into standardized goods.

M+'s short video, Artist Lens | Cao Fei: Constructing 'Whose Utopia', is useful because it approaches the work through construction rather than only theme.[1] It gives enough visual access to the factory, the performers, and the artist's framing to show why the piece still feels charged. Whose Utopia does not leave the factory in order to imagine freedom. It stages dreams inside the factory, while production logic remains present around them. That is the pressure that keeps the work from becoming a sentimental portrait of workers with hidden talents.

Before watching, hold onto one distinction. A conventional documentary might ask the factory to reveal the truth of work. Cao asks the factory to reveal the tension between assigned work and imagined life. Art21's interview records that the project began as a Siemens/OSRAM-related commission but exceeded the original corporate frame; Cao describes the workers, their dreams, and the factory setting as the material that made the project more than a branding exercise.[2] That matters because the resulting video is not outside capitalism looking in. It is made from inside a commissioned, industrial, globally connected site.

The factory is not just setting

The strongest part of the M+ video is the way it keeps the work's physical setting visible.[1] In Whose Utopia, the factory is not a background that Cao decorates with performance. It is the medium's constraint. Public Delivery's account describes the project as moving from interviews and daily factory observation into staged moments where workers perform aspirations such as ballet, guitar, or dance amid the machines.[4] The point is not that performance magically cancels labor. The point is that the performance cannot be understood without the labor continuing around it.

That is why the OSRAM light-bulb factory is so exact as a site. Lighting is already metaphorical: it promises visibility, clarity, modern interior life. Yet the people who make that light can remain socially dimmed, visible mainly as hands, shifts, and output.[3][4] Cao's title does not ask whose factory this is; it asks whose utopia. The question shifts attention from ownership to imagination. Who gets to picture a future? Who gets to step out of assigned rhythm? Who gets to make desire visible without being punished for inefficiency?

The M+ video helps because it does not isolate Whose Utopia from Cao's broader practice.[1] Cao often works across video, performance, virtual worlds, popular culture, and social spaces; the Commons category's basic biographical record identifies her field across video art, multimedia, installation, photography, and related forms.[5] Whose Utopia belongs in that cross-media frame. It is documentary enough to anchor us in a real factory, but performative enough to prevent the factory from becoming a sociological specimen.

Watch for the split between repetition and interruption

The most important viewing move is to notice interruption. Factory rhythm depends on repetition: stations, motions, standards, shifts, and production targets. Cao's performers do not simply rebel against that rhythm. They insert another rhythm into it. A ballet figure can appear near industrial repetition; a musician can stand inside a space organized for another kind of output; a dancer can move through work lines that usually value efficiency over expressiveness.[1][4]

That split is why the work feels more durable than a generic critique of sweatshop production. If the video merely said "factory work is dehumanizing," it would be morally clear but aesthetically thin. Instead, Whose Utopia gives the workers dream sequences that are beautiful and uneasy at the same time. The performances are not pure liberation because they are staged under the same roof as the labor system. They are not pure illusion either, because they come from conversations, questionnaires, and Cao's effort to make actual workers' ambitions part of the artwork's structure.[2][4]

Around the sections where M+ shows the work's factory imagery and worker-performer logic, the key is to watch the distance between body and role.[1] A worker is still a worker. A performer is also briefly a performer. The film lets both identities occupy the same body without resolving the contradiction. That refusal is the art historical intelligence of the piece. It does not convert workers into symbols of suffering, and it does not flatter the viewer with a simple rescue fantasy. It lets aspiration become visible while keeping the machinery of production in view.

The utopia is temporary, not fake

CCCB's presentation of the work emphasizes that Whose Utopia was born in a Foshan OSRAM factory and that Cao organized workshops with workers, many of them young migrants from smaller towns, asking about dreams and aspirations.[3] That workshop structure matters. The utopian element is not imported from outside by the artist alone. It is produced through a temporary social arrangement: questions, visits, conversations, rehearsal, staging, and finally a video that can travel into museums.

Temporary does not mean trivial. A performance staged for a camera can still change what a workplace is allowed to mean. For the length of the work, the factory becomes double. It remains a place where products are made, but it also becomes a place where personal futures are rehearsed in public. That double status is why Whose Utopia feels closer to a social experiment than to a normal artist documentary.[2][3]

The title also resists closure. A utopia usually means a no-place, an imagined better arrangement outside present constraints. Cao's work relocates that no-place into a very specific site: a light-bulb factory in the Pearl River Delta, filmed during China's early twenty-first-century manufacturing surge.[3][4] The factory is not escaped; it is re-seen. The workers' movements do not abolish production; they make production share the frame with other forms of life.

That is the reason the M+ video is worth embedding rather than merely citing. The written sources can tell us about Foshan, OSRAM, workshops, questionnaires, and the broader Cao Fei practice.[2][3][4] The video lets the viewer feel the harder formal problem: an artwork has to keep the factory real while making dream-life visible enough that it cannot be dismissed as private fantasy.[1]

What to carry away

The lasting value of Whose Utopia is that it refuses two easy stories. It refuses the corporate story in which the factory is a smooth engine of opportunity. It also refuses the outside-art-world story in which workers appear only as evidence of exploitation. Cao Fei's sharper move is to make the factory a contested image-space. In that space, labor, youth migration, music, dance, commodity production, and future-thinking all become visible at once.[1][2][3][4]

That does not make the work optimistic in a simple way. The dreams are brief, framed, and dependent on an art project that can leave the factory more easily than most workers can. But that limitation is part of the force. Whose Utopia asks what a dream is worth when it appears inside the system that normally consumes the dreamer's time. The answer is not a program or a policy. It is a clearer image of a contradiction that modern consumption often hides: the things that brighten one life may be made by people whose own futures remain only partly lit.

Sources

1. M Plus, "Artist Lens | Cao Fei: Constructing 'Whose Utopia'" - YouTube video on the making and context of the work.
2. Art21, "Cao Fei: Coming Up Hip-Hop and Questioning Utopia" - interview on Whose Utopia, workers, music, and project origins.
3. CCCB, "Cathrine Kramer presents 'Whose Utopia?' by Cao Fei" - exhibition video page describing the OSRAM factory setting and worker workshops.
4. Public Delivery, "Cao Fei's Whose Utopia?: The lives & dreams of Chinese workers" - overview of the project's factory interviews, performances, and social frame.
5. Wikimedia Commons, "File:Cao-fei-lenbachhaus-2024.jpg" - photographic image metadata for the Cao Fei portrait used in this post.