China’s urban migration since 1979 is the largest peacetime movement of people in human history—around 277 million Chinese have moved from rural areas to the cities, where they are officially classified as migrant labourers. Their lives, and issues of consumption, production, labour and identity are potent topics for the country’s artists.
Typically semi-skilled, they often suffer discrimination. They are outsiders in the cities, often separated from their families, and the hukou household registration system restricts their access to health and other public services as it is based on a person’s place of origin. Migrants’ cultural, economic and often linguistic displacement remains one of the most pressing inequities of Chinese society.
Migration was forbidden during the Maoist era, but “after 1979, with Reform and Opening, population and merchandise alike began to ‘migrate’,” says the artist Li Jinghu, who was born in 1972 in the southern manufacturing hub of Dongguan. “In the 1980s, a large number of farmers in the countryside began blindly migrating, lacking definite purpose, gathering at the train stations or in front of factory gates in the coastal areas, hoping to be hired.”
Lives in transit Li collected migrants’ mobile phones to create Waterfall (2015-16), a digital cascade of water, a version of which the Beijing-based gallery Magician Space presented at Art Basel in Hong Kong this year. He used the phones to record videos of running taps, then combined them into a video loop evoking the flow of water and time, derived from the ambient sounds of phones and ablutions coming every day from his labourer neighbours. “Their lives are running away like the running water,” Li says.
He recently participated in Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art’s group show, Trace of Existence, along with Liang Shuo. Li is currently showing at OCAT Shenzhen in the land-themed show Digging a Hole in China (until June 26), along with other migrant-focused artists including Liu Chuang, Zhuang Hui and Zheng Guogu.
Li says: “Migrants appear suddenly en masse at newly built factories. They are constantly moving so you have time to recognise every face. Despite their different personalities, they follow the same life pattern. This mute group accounts for 70% of the population in China. Therefore, one of my starting points of making art is to record their life trajectory.” For Stone Feces (2006), Li painted rocks with cabbages, a trademark and staple food for migrants.
“The surging migrant population has already become an important feature of China’s major cities,” says the artist Liu Guangyun. “I focus on how this reality impacts regional culture and people’s psychological state.”
In 2002 he went to a Shanghai construction site where he shot ID-type portraits of dozens of workers which he then combined with construction waste to cast 100 bricks to create Brick, Human and City. “There is a striking contrast between the rapid modernisation of Shanghai and the realities of life for migrant workers, and I wanted these bricks to witness and document the process of urban development,” he says. “China has a strict household registration system, Chinese people have a relatively strong concept of hometown origins, and migrants are not treated nearly the same as natives in public, so identity is something that comes up a lot. In a place like Shanghai huge differences between people can emerge.”
For Shanghai Original Color (2015), he wanted to “eliminate the differences of class and identity through taking the clothing of people of different professions and bleaching them”. Liu says: “I collected clothing from a large number of people from different walks of life in Shanghai, and bleached them back to the fabric’s original color. The differences between people’s interests and identities all disappear at once.”
Those left behind Many others explore the working lives of migrants, such as Shanghai theatre and performance troupe Grass Stage and Guangzhou artist collective Big Dipper Group. Others explore the life that migrants have left behind, such as projects about displacement caused by the Three Gorges Dam by artists Zhuang Hui and Ji Yunfei. Ye Funa, who was in a group show at Tabula Rasa Gallery in Beijing earlier this year, follows dissolute young people left behind in a Yunnan village in News from Shimian. Liu Guangyun, who emigrated to Germany 25 years ago and now works between Shanghai and Mainz, says migrant labourers’ sense of displacement speaks to his own, albeit more privileged, sense of dual identity. “I cannot go back to my original outlook, and it is hard to blend into a foreign culture,” he says, adding: “In Shanghai, most migrants who spend time here find it difficult to return to their home villages.”
“This migration has changed the fate of every Chinese person, myself included,” Li Jinghu says. “But the fundamental situation has essentially never changed: most migrants’ children repeat the lifecycle of their parents, so they migrate without beginning or end.”
Following journey from farm to factory Migrants’ personal effects are a popular material for Chinese artists. Liu Chuang’s Buying Everything on You series (2005-8) used those of migrants at a labour market in Shenzhen. The commentary on migrant alienation by Li Liao, who had a solo show earlier this year at White Space Beijing, includes the A Single Bed video series (2011), in which Li beds down in various public places, while for A Slap in Wuhan (2010) he hired a stranger online to publicly accost and assault him. Zhou Tao’s video 1234 (2007-8) compiles some of the hokey mass dance routines that workers are often obliged to participate in before factory shifts.
Han Bing recalls his impoverished rural village and fellow migrants through his Walking the Cabbage series (begun 2000), in which the humble vegetable replaces the pampered dogs owned by wealthy urbanites at the end of a leash. Liang Shuo’s Urban Peasants statue series (begun 2000) captures the awkward fashion and disoriented expressions of rural arrivals.