138 | sep/oct 2017 | ISSUE 105 China’s megalopolises, as we know them today, were built by hundreds of millions of migrant workers. These waidi laborers—workers from “elsewhere”—come from across China to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other key locations to build the cities and their own savings. Numbering some 280 million, they live itinerant lives, constantly forging new friendships or even brotherhoods (and sisterhoods). Double Fly Art Center (DFAC), a collective of nine artists all born after 1980, believe themselves not dissimilar from these migrant workers. For their exhibition “The Bro Generation” at de Sarthe Gallery in Beijing, the group asked, “What would art by these migrant laborers look like?” DFAC engage in mischievous performance and video works: dressing up as old men to wreak havoc on Shanghai’s Bund, or bathing in porridge at a Swiss hotel. Their carefree, boyish and boisterous ideas are easily misread as meaningless, chauvinistic and silly positions transmuted through art, yet the absurdity of these acts manages to get at something about modern China, especially for young people who face extreme expectations with an equally severe likelihood of supposed failure. To counter those conditions, DFAC suggests that surreal absurdity is a tenable stance. There was much anticipation for the opening performance at de Sarthe Gallery, but viewers were shocked when they found the full crew passed out on bunk beds that they had been sleeping on inside the gallery during the installation of their show—a few tabs of Xanax made sure they would not be awoken by gallerygoers shuffling by. Like migrant laborers, the artists were acting as temporary residents for the purpose of construction. Detritus, such as empty packaging and discarded clothing, was scattered all around after a week spent living out of bunks. Live- streamed footage of the sleeping artist-laborers was visible on screens around their beds. Nine prone bodies each on a mattress, plus an admixture of stray items, made up the central room: a basketball hoop, which DFAC members were later spotted using for a basketball game, with zero regard for the sanctity of their artworks; numerous packets of vividly colored playdough, some of which was used as an adhesive for two metal wire forms on opposite walls, or plonked onto and across three industrial metal structures; two tall green plants; a pile of hay; two wooden planks with flip-flops nailed to them; and a workbench with three or four types of tools. Phew, take a breath, and blame the mess on DFAC’s extemporaneous approach to producing art. The rest of the show was split into three smaller spaces. The most interesting was lit by red light à la an Amsterdam brothel and packed with eight bizarre sculptures, variously produced from polyurethane foam, metal wire and tubes of LED light, one also with a pineapple covered in paint but for its leafy hair. One of these sculptural forms is clearly meant to resemble a handgun; the rest are purposefully ambiguous. While the whole floor was covered in a white gauzy material, only half of the room had thick lumps of the white polyurethane foam ejaculated onto its walls. The last two sections were upstairs. First, ten photographic prints were unhung and barely unwrapped. Careful examination revealed smashed objects in the images, but it was difficult to say exactly what they were. The answer was in the next room, hidden behind black curtains. Black-robed humans in tactile servitude caressed nine bronze-cast body parts. Each member of the DFAC team had chosen teeth, or buttocks, or a pudgy stomach, or crossed legs, or some other section of their own anatomy to be cast. The crushed smithereens of these sculptures’ clay molds proved to be the subject matter of the ten prints from the previous room. DFAC’s success lies in the unique visual language that relays their ruminations, but not the content of these reflections themselves. They want to say that the migrant laborer experience typifies life in modern China, yet the exhibition notably elided any recognition of the female migrant experience. DFAC offer the supposition that modern China is in equal parts schizophrenic, surreal and itinerant; while this is difficult to refute, it is also a commonly rehearsed, unoriginal and unenlightening idea. Thomas mouna beijing de Sarthe Gallery Double Fly Art Center The Bro GeneraTion