Entering Lombard-Freid Projects, I saw something that gave a generational thrill: an exquisitely equipped eight-by-four-foot fingerboard skatepark. Eight boards, arranged in a neat line, called out. Being a good journalist, I made my way to the desk to ask a hard-hitting question: “Can I play?” “Of course you can!” I was told, and so I got to work, trying to remember how to ollie on the centerpiece of Cao Fei’s exhibition Play Time. Sandwiched between its quarter-pipes and rails were loose models of the Minaret of Samarra and a Greek hexastyle portico, tiny odes to ancient architecture doubling as sweet ramps. Their authority and history naturally fades away as you grind on them with a toy skateboard, which is exactly what Cao’s after. This is an exhibition that’s not content to use play as a subject; here, it’s a medium, and critical to the operation of the works on view.
Surrounding the skatepark, the walls of the front gallery are mostly occupied by six sets of paired photographs depicting characters from CBeebies—the BBC’s channel aimed at preschool children—outside the plush pastel forests of their television home. Here, they’re on the move, and possibly on the run: one work titled Escaped From The Garden shows them luggage-in-hand, while in others they sleep beneath overpasses, peek out of tents, and wash themselves in muddy pools. In one, Papa’s Funeral, they bury their dead, before returning to “The Garden” once more. It’s a narrative about play—its ghettoization and its slim chance for survival in the adult world—delivered in the form of play: each pair of photographs is actually a spot-the-difference game. Disappointingly, though, the differences themselves don’t tell us much. They’re incidental details, not elements of any narrative or symbolic value, so my effort and engagement were wasted on noticing that a towel had changed color, or that a hand was moved slightly. Cao has introduced into art an ingenious tool for directing the viewer’s attention, but leaves its potential largely unused.
East Wind, a video centered on a truck to which the artist attached a Thomas the Tank Engine faÃ§ade, has similar issues. The familiar playful face at the front of the truck is repudiated by the matter-of-factness with which the truck goes about its business—transporting rubble from a construction site to a dump—but beyond that, there’s not much happening here. The series of reactions I saw in passerby in the video—interest, then laughter, then disappointment—ultimately mirrored my own.
A set of three videos, Shadow Life, complete the exhibition. Made up entirely of elaborate shadow puppets, the videos tell simple narratives of urbanization and the Cultural Revolution. They’re engaging and beautiful, but it never becomes clear why shadow puppets were chosen; yes, they’re fun, and let Cao tell moral stories in an unpretentious way, but she fails to show here what novel ideas we might arrive at with our new vocabulary of play. As with the rest of the show, we’re presented with a finely-crafted tool, just waiting for a purpose.