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Dear ladies and gentlemen, I’m China Tracy, 
the avatar of Cao Fei,

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and I’m her interpreter.

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Our generation has grown up in a fluid and 
mobile environment where cultures mix and diverge.

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Pop culture has spread rapidly into 
every corner of China.

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When I was little, I would go out and learn street dance.

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Later, I fell in love with hip-hop music.

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I see the world with a sense of humor; street culture is 
a very natural, wild, free, and spontaneous form of expression.

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It’s like the notion of sampling 
in hip-hop, which is to mix all different kinds of things together.

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In music videos, visuality, 
montage, music, and imagery are blended into a single process.

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Perhaps music takes the place of 
some of the narrative and feeling.

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Music itself becomes a very emotional part of the work.

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If I had grown up just focusing on the written word or photography or still images,

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my way of 
thinking would have been totally different.

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I had just graduated from college and had 
opportunity to become exposed to the working world.

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I got a taste of reality in a pretty 
close and intimate way,

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and I felt that I could critique reality through my artwork.

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Looking back years later, the critique 
seems a bit severe, even blunt.

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But my later works began to reflect 
on a more thorough understanding of society as a whole,

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and they are quite different from 
the impulsive urges of that early period.

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[ strumming music ]

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After I did the first "Hip-Hop Project," I 
started working on cosplayers.

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We translate cosplay into Chinese as role-playing. 
It grows from a generation under the

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influence of the cartoon culture.

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Neither cosplaying nor hip-hop is native to China,

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but when we experience it, we feel somehow that 
it has become very indigenous and original.

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I was working part-time as an art director for 
advertising companies.

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When scouting locations, we would 
come across ruined scenes and images.

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Those places have left a deep impression on me.

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These settings and backgrounds are very important to the characters and how they relate to each other.

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Even in real life, the cosplayers place themselves into cartoon characters roles

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so much that they carry their cartoon 
roles into their everyday lives.

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It is a new kind of role reversal which also reflects the younger generation's discontent with their roles in real life.

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Cosplay reflects the gap between these two generations.

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Neither is willing to strike a 
compromise or reach an accord with the other.

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When I got an invitation from Siemens 
electric, I started to work on the video "Whose Utopia?"

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I thought that this might be a 
good opportunity to shoot inside a factory,

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usually very difficult because generally there is 
a high level of commercial protectionism.

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It’s not an expose nor is it about political correctness.

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It attempts to examine this particular kind of reality from multiple angles,

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how workers are on the lookout for the 
chance and opportunity to survive.

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It also has this avatar-like element 
with the workers role-playing their fantasies.

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I often have the feeling that they truly value 
this kind of opportunity to remake themselves.

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For corporations to let artists create works with the factory as the backdrop is an attempt to forge a corporate culture.

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What artists do in reality in the art world is not all that important to the corporation.

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What’s important is the project that is created.

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My composer Zhang Anding introduced me to Second 
Life in 2006.

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He was purchasing land in an online game, and he said that he can construct and have his own second life.

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Subsequently, I opened this account, my 
account for China Tracy.

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I was absolutely enthralled and spellbound by it from the beginning.

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I started with the very basics, how to take my first baby steps, and how to talk to people.

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The whole process 
was totally captivating and riveting.

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China is her surname, Tracy the given name.

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I wanted to enter this virtual world with an ordinary person's perspective to see what was happening out there.

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In the beginning, I was working with a 
set of predesigned personas

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that a new second life user can choose from when constructing their avatar.

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Over time, I spent a lot of money buying her skin, her eyes, her figure, and even her sex organs to give her a more modern look.

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"iMirror," my documentary made in second life, 
has a feminine perspective.

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In this documentary, you will see a strong sense of selfhood, a sense of using my own body, my own self to explore this world.

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The encounter between me and Hug Yue occurred when I was exploring around in my online journey.

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I saw a very handsome guy 
playing a piano.

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I was drawn by the piano music, which was very romantic.

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Quietly and secretively, I stood at a 
distance, shooting the scene of him playing the piano.

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After a while, he asked China Tracy for a dance.

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We began to get to know each other, and I found him a gentleman with a fine sense of humor.

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There are many romantic stories like this 
one in second life between one male and one female avatar.

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But perhaps behind the scenes, there may be two females, but in real life they are two guys.

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Nonetheless, romance still transpires between these avatars

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like the case with me and Hug Yue, even though 
it did not ultimately lead to a full-blown romance.

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I finally learned that he was about 67, 
a fairly old guy in real life.

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He is a communist, a big fan of Marx, and he would often wear 
a t-shirt with Marx’s image.

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So I got to see both his romantic and idealistic sides. 
I also got the impression of him being

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very political and zealous, having a kind 
of-- in Mao’s words-- romantic heroism.

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Through "iMirror," you can peek into the digital world.

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Everything is much more intense than the real world.

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It’s much more unbridled and wild. 
That’s why so many people get hooked on Second Life.

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In it, they try to find a kind of life 
with emotions that they want for themselves in real life.

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But in the end, you will find that in 
this documentary, that is something beyond reach.

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"RMB City" was conceived while I was 
still exploring Second Life.

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I was wondering if I could have my own 
community and my own city built purely by myself.

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So I started to envision what this city might look like.

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In 2007, the video of RMB City 
was basically finished.

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It’s an imagining, a draft design of the 
overall appearance of this city.

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It represents the building and development of an urban center with all that entails: investment, expansion, overdevelopment.

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What’s important is to make an 
imaginary city run smoothly like a real one.

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We first came up with a list of options for all the different components in the building of 
the city,

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different buildings and landmarks that we absolutely want to have in the cityscape.

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We designed an urban plan by combining these different components utilizing collages.

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Our next step was to feed the design into three-dimensional software to build it up into an architectural model.

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Then we turned this software over to our virtual architects to be uploaded into Second Life.

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I would prefer it to be a more open environment

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where you can keep adding things to implement whatever ideas you come up with.

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We’re now at a stage where we have to 
feel our way or as Deng Xiaoping said,

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"Cross the river by touching the stones."

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Take our current mayoral program for example.

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Each mayor will serve a three-month term for RMB City

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and be free to make his own policies and decisions or to have her own interpretation of the city.

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I think this also releases me from any responsibility 
to keep control of the city.

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There will be no party committee. We will have a board of 
directors.

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We’ll have a judicial system with a judge somewhat like legendary Bao Gong, the Chinese embodiment of justice.

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RMB City is in many ways like the painting from the Han 
Dynasty,

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with clouds and mist, hills and rivers, and the interrelationship between humans and nature.

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It made me wonder if this aesthetic is 
deeply rooted in the Asian way of thinking.

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I’ve always been looking for these connections, the differences and similarities between the past and present,

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the Asian and the Western.

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RMB is the abbreviation for the Chinese currency, 
the renminbi.

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"Renmin" means the people, the general population, and the "r" could almost stand for republic or revolution.

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In Chinese, the name sounds like “the people's city.”

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So it comes to take on all these associative meanings. I think it sounds 
like "remember city," a city of memories.

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I don't think that building my own city is an expression of individualism.

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I feel it is precisely an acknowledgment of the belief in and the practice of democracy.

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I think this project will lead to the foundation on 
which to experiment with utopian practices.

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[ ANNOUNCER ] To learn more about 
Art21: “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

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and its educational resources,

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please visit us online at: 
PBS.org

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Art21: “Art in the Twenty-First Century” is available on Blu-Ray and DVD.

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The companion book is also available.

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To order, visit us online at: shopPBS.org

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or call PBS Home Video at: 
1-800-PLAY-PBS