Industrial Exotic: Aestheticizing Chinese Labour for a Global Gaze

On October 7, 2005, the exhibition “Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky” opened at the Brooklyn Museum. The cold-toned spotlights illuminate more than 60 pieces of exquisitely framed large-scale photographs with deceptive calm of unsettling scenes of industrial modernity in China: factory floors populated by thousands of workers, pixelated labouring bodies on the mountains of discarded materials, landscapes scarred by coal mining, oil pumping, and the monumental construction site of the Three Gorges Dam, hailed as one of the nation’s most ambitious projects. Documentary Manufactured Landscapes (2006, Canada, Jennifer Baichwal) captured the reception of this exhibition: the camera followed visitors as they wandered through the gallery, pausing before an image, their brows furrowed as they confronted distant industrial vistas from China, transported through the lens of a Canadian-born photographer, in a New York museum six thousand miles away.

Sixteen years later, under a markedly different global climate defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia was re-screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Projected onto the hanging screen of MoMA’s glass façade against the glow of Manhattan’s skyline, the film transformed the repetitive gestures of factory workers in a Pearl River Delta OSRAM lighting plant into a visual dialogue between the two poles of the global supply chain: the illuminated skyscraper and the illumination manufactory, momentarily coexisting within MoMA’s translucent architectural space. The spectators’ responses were quieter. In an almost detached mode of viewing, industrial labour no longer provoked confrontation but a melancholic, nostalgic awareness of capital’s seamless circulation in the continuum of globalisation.

These two exhibitions emerged from different historical moments, yet they both shed light on a shared subject: what I refer to as “Chinese labour images.” By “Chinese labour images,” I mean the audiovisual representations of workers and working processes across China’s state-owned, private, and public‑private manufacturing sectors. These images depict light industries (e.g., textiles, assembly, and consumer goods), heavy industries (e.g., steel, mining, and construction), and emerging industries (e.g., digital manufacturing, logistics, and service economies). They visualise the embodied practices of wage labour within material environments that index China’s shifting modes of production under post‑socialist and global capitalist transformations.

Such a juxtaposition prompts the following questions: How is the gaze toward Chinese labour and factories shaped through aesthetic choices, and how are these representations capitalised through art‑market networks? How are the meanings of such imagery transmitted and transformed through the circulation among different audiences, across venues and sites?

These questions lead to the tension between aestheticisation and politicisation in documentary practice. Rather than addressing a direct causal relation, this paper aims to illustrate the dynamic between the two within a cohesive historiography of labour images and the discourse of “Industrial China” and its “rising” from the early 2000s to the present, viewed through a global perspective of mediation.

As Caetlin Benson‑Allott observes, media discourses “are deeply entangled in material culture” (Benson‑Allott, 14). This nexus became increasingly visible with China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, which marked a pivotal shift toward export‑led economic growth and integrated the nation as a central link within global supply chains (Zhao 2023, 235–236). Even as world trade slowed in the wake of the global financial crisis, China’s import‑to‑GDP ratio continued to rise (Lardy 2014, 36–38). This economic transformation ties a new visibility of industrial matter directly to the workforce, reflecting the productivity base of globalisation. The shifting materiality of “Made in China” goods, in turn, established a link between the “rising China” discourse and the nation’s dense labour as the embodiment of its ascension.

Against this socio‑political background, I propose a framework of the “industrial exotic” as an emerging category that configures cultural otherness through representations of Chinese labour. The cinematic apparatus fabricates streamlined working bodies, overflowing commodities, and industrial environments into patterns and rhythms. This formal transformation displaces labour from its lived social conditions and inserts it into a realm of perceptual unnaturalness. Through the production of cognitive distance, the industrial exotic underscores how the reproduction of images in documentary dramatizes the alienation and otherness of labourers as a form of ideological interpellation—where those who view are positioned as fundamentally different from those who are viewed.

Many scholars have noticed a tendency that, with accustomed boundaries crushed by the flux of globalisation (Tsing 2000, 328), the method and subject of exoticism are also changing regarding the imagined audience. The historical binary of coloniser and colonised, once defined through territorial domination, has been rearticulated within late capitalist production as consumer and manufacturer: those whose labour remains materially entangled with production and those whose distance from it ensures the illusion of cleanliness.

With Said’s legacy, Daniel Vukovich observes a post‑Cold War sinological orientalism corresponding to the 2000s that saw a confluence of “China” as halted in the process of becoming the same as the USA and the West. Orientalism is now closer to the cultural logic of capitalism, even as it shows the afterlives of colonial discourse. This shift reflects our era of increasing globalisation: an ever‑closer Sino‑West relationship and the overlapping of colonial discourses (Vukovich 2013, 5).

Olivia Khoo proposes the “Chinese Exotic,” initially used to explain the conceiving of a gendered Chinese image of femininity, as extending to the image of labour and industrial machinery—not as oppressed, but as forming part of the new visibility of China, connected with its economic rise and emergent modernities: what is exotic now is no longer the old, primitive China within Asia, but the idea of the cosmopolitan, the rich, the modern, and the technological (Khoo 2007, 4). Ien Ang further suggests a “neo‑Orientalism” rooted in what she terms “Industrial Asia,” referring to discourses surrounding the rise of East Asian economies framed as modern, hyper‑technological, and threatening (Ang and Stratton 2018, 66–68).

In this essay, I argue that the industrial exotic, particularly through its representations of labour images, functions as a mode of mediating difference in divergent ways from the material and immaterial dimensions of labour and its environments. It manifests through the seemingly opposed aesthetic categories of the sublime and kitsch, which together reconfigure heterogeneous forms of labour. The industrial exotic does not merely depict labour but also circulates as a commodity within the culture and fine‑art network, catering to global fantasies of production within a “world factory” characterised by unprecedented mass, toil, and elsewhere‑ness through geographical and experiential distance. By providing a spectatorial distance, this exoticism accommodates ethical awareness alongside voyeuristic interest, positioning labour images as both ideological interpellation and a consumable cultural product.

The Hollow Sublime and Dysfunctional Nationalism in Manufactured Landscapes

Manufactured Landscapes is a 90‑minute Canadian documentary that tracks photographer Edward Burtynsky’s travels across China from 2002 to 2005, tracing a visual exploration of drastic transformations in socio‑economic development, environmental intervention, and everyday living conditions. It follows his journey from the electronic factories and dumping grounds of the Pearl River Delta, where mountains of e‑waste are manually recycled, to the labour and ecological conditions surrounding the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, and eventually to the renewed metropolitan spaces of Shanghai, whose rapid erection was accompanied by mass migration and large‑scale relocation of households. The documentary assembles footage of China’s industrial landscapes, the presentation and reception of Burtynsky’s exhibitions and public talks, and his large‑format photography inserted as still images.

The film opens with an eight‑minute continuous lateral tracking shot through the Can Kun factory, a one‑kilometre‑long site that employs 23,000 workers and assembles most of the world’s clothes irons. The shot panoramically reconfigures the mile‑long assembly line into a bizarre yet mesmerising scroll in which body parts become interchangeable with machine parts. Each worker is embedded in their own cubicle, objectified equally with the product they are working on; repetition is rendered endless through the elongated shot. Sometimes, workers look back at the camera with blunt confusion or nonchalance, cueing the camera’s existence as an outside gaze.

After this hypnotic shot, the title card appears, featuring Burtynsky’s final photographic composition. In the sequence following, the documentary shows the other side of Can Kun’s manufacturing scenario: workers dismissed from their posts, moving from pixelated, homogenised individuals to a collective swarm on an outside ground, listening to “inspiring” slogans broadcast from a loudspeaker. The high‑angle shot configures the re‑organisation of the yellow‑uniformed particles of labour into a yellow uniform cloud. Whether rendered as repetitively pixelated or collectively swarming elements in the frame, factory workers’ identities blur into labour power, becoming extensions of overwhelming industrial materiality and a mirroring allegory of the product they assemble.

This opening sequence establishes the film’s central tension between the labouring body and its materialistic surroundings in China. Temporarily embedded within the machinery of production, workers become pixelated elements of the assembly line itself. Then they are collectively mobilised in the form of swarms. Camera work and editing apply these aesthetic choices as the first apparatus to configure labour into image; Burtynsky’s photography emphasises them again as the second layer, presented as stills; the gallery exhibition, later shown in the documentary, is the third layer and represents the mediation of such images.

Through these three layers of aestheticisation, labour and its alienation are captured as compositions—appealing and appalling at the same time. Here arises the fundamental question: what are we supposed to feel before such a dual spectacle—the vastness of industrial grandeur and the formal beauty of its representation, especially when it is performed by human bodies? Are we to feel awe, or are we to feel awful?

Adorno reminds us that “the transition to the primacy of form codified by the category of the beautiful inherently tends toward formalism” (Adorno, 51). Manufactured Landscapes thus exemplifies how aestheticisation of labour risks formalising exploitation into beauty. Burtynsky’s imagery inhabits this dialogue: between aesthetic contemplation and ethical unease, between the sublime scale of production and the visibility of humans.

Unlike other neoliberally oriented states, the Chinese state has actively mobilised the ideology of nationalism; it defines itself as carrying out a national project to make China strong and powerful. This nationalism, however, coexists with authoritarian policies that discipline labour, suppress and deactivate civil society to attract foreign investment, and eventually becomes dysfunctional.

Such dysfunctional nationalism is exemplified in the interview with a mobilised worker who mentions the difficulty of working conditions: “Of course it is hard,” and notes his daily wage is only 30 yuan (approximately 3.8 USD in 2006) without prompting. His figure is set against the grey, pale construction site as backdrop, rendered as an outlier of the ongoing project behind. He confesses his fatigue: “I am just working for our bosses, get paid here.” Following shots of workers with blank expressions further suggest there is barely genuine pride or motivation in their labour contributing to national ambition, cueing the ironic situation in which Chinese industrial outburst, with its tightly organised party‑state machinery, has proven effective in dividing the working class and silencing labour voices (Gallagher 2005).

As Alvin So and Yin‑wah Chu note, in the post‑reform era, facing an ideological vacuum after the waning of Marxist legitimacy, the PRC leveraged nationalism as its primary ideological medium. The party‑state thus justified its authoritarian developmentalism as a national project of rejuvenation (So and Chu 2012, 184). Within this context, Manufactured Landscapes captures not merely the spectacle of industrial expansion but also its ideological paradox. The grandeur of state‑led development becomes indistinguishable from its ruins: ecological devastation, displaced communities, and exhausted human bodies that animate the machine of progress.

The exaggerated environment‑body dynamic, signifying dysfunctional nationalism, becomes particularly visible in the Sanxia Gorge construction sequence. In this zoom‑out shot of demolished buildings before Sanxia, the camera first fixes on a girl amid the debris, where buildings have been torn down to make space for the Three Gorges project. She holds a bowl of noodles with chopsticks; people wander on the ruins, suggesting a primitiveness: unawareness or nonchalance toward the wrecked environment. Then the camera zooms out to gradually include workers walking aimlessly on the ruins from a bird’s‑eye view. Labouring bodies become heterogeneous units in the debris: zooming‑out turns individuals into tiny black moving bits among massive piles of rubble, and distances the spectator at the same time.

The film’s panoramic vision transforms these contradictions into what I call the hollow sublime as one perspective on industrial exoticism: a visual mode in which the rhetoric of grandeur (industrial magnificence) is undercut by its own material overwhelm. The hollow landscapes of debris and unnaturally nested labouring bodies mirror dysfunctional nationalism: one that fills its ideological vacuum with suggestive images of grandeur for its own sake, juxtaposed against dehumanised individuals.

Yet instead of directly confronting ideological masking and discussing the driving forces behind such labour conditions, it presents them through estrangement. Labouring bodies, rendered simultaneously dispossessed in the remnant, are subsumed into the moral economy of spectatorship where empathy is stylised for visual appreciation. In this sense, Manufactured Landscapes exemplifies what T. J. Demos calls the political unconscious: vulnerable both to solutions forged by exclusive social and political interests and to commercial exploitation that uses political rhetoric for economic profit (Demos 2009, 17).

In the detachment of aestheticisation, exposure is inevitably trapped in otherness, embedding a structural separation between “us” (viewer and image‑maker), positioned as those with interpretive authority, and the looked‑at subject, whose labour remains bound within authoritarian state‑capitalism. In this process, what Edward Said terms “foreignness as a mark of permanent estrangement” (Said 1979, 244) becomes a governing visual logic: labour image as an object of interest rather than agent for political transformation.

Burtynsky himself articulates this ambivalence in an off‑screen monologue:

“By not saying what you should say, that may allow them to look at something they may never look at and to see their world a little differently... We don’t want to give up what we have, but what we have is creating the problem that runs deep... it may not be a simple right or wrong; we need a new way of thinking.”

This “new way of thinking” signals a retreat from didacticism, proposing an ethics of suspended judgment. However, such suspension also functions as rhetorical alibi: a way of neutralising the politics of representation for commodification within the global art economy. These images are converted into exchangeable capital under institutionalised museum culture, where documentary immediacy yields to market legibility.

Their circulation performs a secondary act of extraction, which might be called a double exploitation of labour. In this cycle, labouring bodies from industrialising nations are doubly mined, first as productive force, then as exoticised visual resource. Their perceived “primitiveness,” cast in relief against the West’s de‑industrialised self‑image, lays a discursive authority shaped by hierarchical manufacturing‑consuming relationships.

The Melancholic Kitsch and Self‑Othering in Whose Utopia

As China’s industrial dominance took shape at the turn of the millennium, the external gaze in documentary filmmaking and its discourse was also internalised. Where Manufactured Landscapes deploys exoticism formed by outsiders’ detachment, Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia, sponsored by the Siemens Art Program, provides an example of what Tang Xiaobing terms “self‑orientalisation” (Tang 1993, 7) through labour imagery.

Its reception lifespan within the Western art world has been temporally and spatially expansive. Since its debut in 2006, the film has been exhibited at institutions such as MoMA, Tate, M+, and the Guggenheim. This extended trajectory of institutional validation underscores a mimetic impulse grounded in universalist ideologies, which Tang identifies as premises for self‑representation within Asian processes of identity formation and modes of visual self‑fashioning.

Like Manufactured Landscapes, the film is an assemblage of images and image‑making. Shot in an OSRAM light‑bulb factory in the Pearl River Delta, it consists of three parts. “Imagination of Product” collages footage of the assembly line; close‑ups magnify workers’ bodies as they concentrate on assembling and sorting parts. Electronic music underscores the rhythm of gestures and conveyor belts. The rawness of production and workers’ casual clothes suggest the unfiltered intimacy of labour.

In sharp contrast, the second section, “Factory Fairytale,” and the third, “My Future is not a Dream,” are clearly staged. “Factory Fairytale” features workers showcasing talents in the plant: a woman performing a peacock dance in the warehouse, a young man playing guitar, a middle‑aged man breakdancing on the production floor. Others continue monotonous tasks with expressionless faces. Vitality and monotony collide in the same frame.

The third section shows workers standing motionless in various corners of the factory—on desks, alongside the assembly line, before a wall of awards—staring into the camera as cheerful English‑language folk music plays. The title references a popular 1980s Chinese song celebrating the rewards of hard work. Here, the phrase is ironic: futures remain precarious amid rapid development; optimism is a survival posture in the dormitory‑factory complex.

The duality of labour bodies as both instrumental and individual is highlighted through contrasts. The first part applies observational close‑ups to production; the second and third employ audiovisual asynchrony to accentuate alienation. Absurdity operates through kitsch: emotionally charged imagery with highly identifiable subject matter.

In Whose Utopia, factory labour becomes stylised symbol, catering to sensibilities of the art market. Mass‑culture references, sentimental tones, and sarcastic mimicry offer digestible otherness. Situated within the early‑2000s “Chinese art boom,” kitsch emerges as a legible mode through which “Chineseness” can be packaged as culturally distinct for international audiences. It carries a residue of socialist memory, reviving fragments of collective life already fading from everyday experience.

The context of production is crucial: commissioned and sponsored by Siemens, Whose Utopia participates directly in the art‑culture economy. By mobilising kitsch, favoured in early‑2000s Western framings of China, the film repackages mechanical reproduction in Chinese industry into affective registers tailored for consumption, satisfying the global art world’s desire for emotional resonance at the unseen end of the supply chain.

In an interview with Philip Tinari for Art21, Cao describes her method at OSRAM: workers were selected based on “interesting answers” to questionnaires; they collaborated in group workshops. Her stated aim is not exposé or political correctness, but examining reality from multiple angles: survival, dreams, nostalgia, migration, and aspiration.

Cao’s statement discloses a tendency toward self‑othering—not through crass exoticism but through tender, affective textures of kitsch. By staging ballet in warehouses and guitar performances among assembly lines, she translates everyday life into stylised tableaux that exaggerate “Chineseness” through contrast: Westernised entertainment in factory dorm complexes, an untouchable dream for mobile workers whose lives are confined to such environments.

Rey Chow articulates this dynamic as the state of “to‑be‑looked‑at‑ness”: through self‑ethnographising one’s own culture, the state of being looked at becomes built into representation (Chow 1993, 180). Whose Utopia offers a stylised, self‑conscious version of cultural intimacy that affirms global viewers’ expectations of the photogenic heterogeneity of Chinese labour. Ambiguity between sincerity and artifice becomes the vehicle through which the factory worker is rendered touchingly foreign, easily commodified for cosmopolitan consumption.

Mediating Difference in a Global Visual Economy

The cross‑border attention to images of Chinese labour exemplifies what Anna Tsing describes as “transnationalism functioning as an umbrella term for globalism” (Tsing 2000, 334). As China’s rapid industrial expansion supplied the world’s production base while Euro‑American economies externalised manufacturing, roles of self and other were reassured. Producers and consumers were redistributed across borders, giving rise to a voyeuristic gaze that frames industrial China as indispensable yet remote.

Documentaries like Manufactured Landscapes imagine a new audience with global awareness, yet one still learning how to look. Cinematic styles become a middle ground of retreat. Rey Chow’s “King Kong syndrome” describes how China becomes “the site of the ‘raw’ material” (Chow 2001, 84). The production of spectacle for a “First World” audience reinforces dichotomies between China and the West through othering (Yang 2024).

Manufactured Landscapes and Whose Utopia exemplify how globalised networks promote privileged consumers and corporate sponsors despite a self‑conscious forgetting of the rest of the world (Tsing 2000, 335). Labour images and workers, though at opposite ends of production, remain bound within the same global chain of exchange—across both material goods and symbolic value configured through the industrial exotic.

The sense of actuality, as Derrida reminds us, is achieved through framing, rhythm, border‑form, and contextualisation (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, 3). Technique and culture may frame these choices, but they cannot fully predetermine them; what takes shape instead is a logic of mediation in which aesthetic detail becomes ideological interpellation. The circulation of these images through museums and festivals reveals a system in which their cultural value mirrors the economic logic of labour circulation itself.

They are conditioned by a broader politics in which interchangeable representations of labour function as metaphors for political urgency without becoming enactment. By understanding the documentary’s claim to recording reality as an ideological consensus between representation and spectatorship, it becomes possible to reclaim a critical awareness of globalism’s endorsement of mobility.

Note: This essay is adapted from “Industrial Exotic: Reconfiguring Chinese Labour Image in Transnational Documentary,” originally titled “Aestheticized Labour as the New Otherness.”