The Force of Mortality and Urban Villages Futurism of Butterfly Island
CH/ EN
Xiaoxing Sun (Tianjin Conservatory of Music)
This article was originally published in the 5th issue of “G.D.ARTS” magazine in 2023
Islands can be classified according to their formation into continental islands, volcanic islands, alluvial islands, and coral islands. Uniquely, coral islands belong not only to geological phenomena but more to life phenomena, as they are formed by the accumulated remains of coral insects over time. Butterfly Island is most similar to this, where it may be a habitat for butterflies, or perhaps a place built from the bodies of countless butterflies—a butterfly graveyard. Casting a “shadow” of death over Butterfly Island is to avoid seeing “Butterfly Island” merely as a product of romanticism for escape and seclusion, while ignoring its tragic reality. Especially remembered is after the first round of performances at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong, on the way back to the hotel, a young dancer and his girlfriend, who had traveled a long way to see him, were laughing and playing, still not having enough of it. The girl was dressed in Y2K style, like a butterfly that had slipped from the stage to reality. ErGao (He Qiwo) looked at them and commented indifferently, “so happy, yet so desperate”. This somewhat disheartening remark seemed to be taken lightly by everyone.
In recent years, when people around talk about Ergao Dance Production Group, they often mention the “nostalgia” emanating from its works. This is reflected in the outdated dance halls of “Disco-Teca” and the “disco” music of the late twentieth century, as well as the McDonald’s advertisement MV and a small town named “Yangjiang” in “Kung Hei Fat Choy”. The former represents the golden years for a generation of fashionable youths, while the latter is the homeland ErGao himself cannot return to nor leave behind. On the surface, this resembles the retro sentiments of late 19th-century Romantic poets, who were disillusioned with modernization and became fascinated with various pre-modern images: knights, nature, childhood, and villages. These sentimental, mysterious, colorful, and idealized visions of the past became a spiritual refuge in that era. ErGao and I, who were teenagers at the turn of the millennium, experienced a hypothetical “end of the world” and “rebirth”. The song says, “The new century comes like a dream”, where the dream has not yet turned into the same dream but is a variety of dreams. This “plural futurism” was encapsulated in the popular clothing, digital devices, and Internet Explorer of the time. Soon after, China joined the World Trade Organization, and people’s imaginations of the future leaned towards a Westernized concept, which, after the pandemic, was replaced by a Chinese model of modernization. This shift from a plural to a singular model of the future left no room for Ergao Dance Production Group. Thus, “Butterfly Island” became their work that marked the closing of their physical space located next to a gym, situated at the commercial premises beneath the Fulicheng East Embankment Bay community, while the newly established “Southern Dance House” continues to exist in a liquid rather than solid state of flow.
The term “dance house” initially conjures images of small-scale, agrarian economies, yet when paired with the “Global South” concept, “Southern” transforms into a strategic retreat, advocating for a stance of non-intervention and development. This approach revisits a “past futurism”, validating the paradoxical truth that retro is the future and is science fiction. Temporally, Butterfly Island exists as an island of the past, yet also as an island that interprets the future through the past. Therefore, its “cyberpunk” flavor seems to originate from the millennium, rather than the sophisticated technological art of today. Utilizing cheap wire string lights, non-biodegradable plastic products, colorful short video materials, and once-popular Qzone background music, paired with kitschy clothing, these symbols frequent in Y2K, vaporwave, and “too cool” subcultures express nostalgia for the late 20th to early 21st century and dissatisfaction with the current smooth, monopolistic capitalist aesthetic. Ergao Dance Production Group doesn’t return to a utopian socialist public ownership economy but rather lingers in the early stages of privatization and urbanization, characterized by street economy, small vendors, and mobile food stalls, fantasizing about halting time there, making Butterfly Island a supra-temporal existence. Butterflies, with their inherently short lifespans, often not exceeding a month and sometimes just days, epitomize the fleeting nature of beauty and the desire to capture youth at its most radiant. Butterfly Island may thus represent a “Neverland” for butterflies, exchanged for their young bones—a place that never ages.
Therefore, there are no greasy middle-aged people on Butterfly Island, only young boys and girls. ErGao shared his girlish heart with them, including those shiny trinkets. Observantly, one would notice that their presence on the island is not reality but an illusion of it, like reflections on the sea surface. Their past lives could have been female textile workers, heartbroken young men, flashy male models from nightclubs decked out in luxury gold color, and energetic young men and women from vocational schools, all squandering their prime years, bodies, sweat, and tears. Because love, virginity, and labor are cheap, youth becomes as devalued as street market goods, cheap and thus wastefully beautiful. ErGao does not seek an explanation from reality but grants these talented and beautiful people eternal life in the splendid “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly Dream”, where death signifies life on Butterfly Island, a drunken dream of existence. “Death probabilities” refer to the likelihood of death among a group over a specific period, such as during wars or epidemics, high mortality events. Instantaneous mortality transforms into a “force of mortality”, the significant energy from mass deaths in a short time—this power of death is what created Butterfly Island. ErGao’s “despair” is the force behind creating “Butterfly Island”, a power of despair, not of hope, the latter being depleted and replaced in countless clichéd mainstream narratives.
The ending of “Butterfly Island” features Huang An’s “New Mandarin Duck and Butterfly Dream” and the opening theme of “Sailor Moon”, “ムーンライト伝説”. Both songs revolve around the theme of “justice”—one portrays the impartial and unyielding BaoQingTian, and the other is about Usagi Tsukino transforming into Sailor Moon with the declaration “In the name of the moon, I will punish you.” Interestingly, Bao Zheng is also depicted with a crescent moon on his forehead, said to be either a scar from an injury in his childhood or a birthmark proving his divine descent, endowing him with supernatural powers to “judge the sun by day and the moon by night”. The latter interpretation deifies Bao, elevating the justice he represents to the level of the heavenly mandate. Thus, both BaoQingTian and Sailor Moon, although not physically present, embody justice through the text of “Justice Bao” and Sailor Moon’s transformation pose, speaking ErGao’s version of “justice”. The poster of “Butterfly Island” features actors as characters, edited into a peach-pink background with the moon bearing ErGao’s face, symbolizing a pantheon under the Moon God religion. Unlike Greek mythology where gods are distinct from humans, Chinese deities often were humans who became divine posthumously, maintaining justice on earth. Butterfly Island serves as a haven where untimely young souls preserve their youth and attain divinity, with childhood rhymes acting as spells for the dead and champions of justice for the living. This framing embraces a self-aware “Middle School 2nd Year Syndrom”, refusing treatment and instead spreading its condition to complicate the overly sanitized environment.
However, it cannot be overlooked that Butterfly Island, as an idyllic paradise, is actually a simulacrum, a result of symbolic exchange with death, a counterfeit version of reality. Unlike the essential world, Butterfly Island is without beginning or end; it lacks an original, originating version, but rather features continuously branching, disseminating segments. It’s not an isolated island but a chain of islands, as seen in “Butterfly Island” outdoor sections, where actors perform dispersedly across islands (also likened to night market stalls). There’s no hierarchical order in this island chain, but rather a network of interconnected nodes, crudely akin to blockchain. Yet, I prefer to liken it to BT downloading (bitstream), those in the know will nod with a knowing smile; in that era of limited internet speeds, such P2P (peer-to-peer) methods of transmission boosted download rates to the maximum capacity of broadband. Piracy thus circulates on Butterfly Island, with the dancer Keke being the only one who exists not on the islands but between them, like a movie’s progress bar not yet fully downloaded—representing the pure abstraction of “flow”. Later, when Sun Mingchi, playing a mermaid, sheds his tail and visits other islands, his butterfly-shaped bubble gun (transformation device) resembles less of Sailor Moon’s and more of the domestically produced Balala the Fairies. The meaningless onomatopoeia “Balala” and those ethereal colorful bubbles are the magic energies used by the fairies of Magic Fairy Castle or Butterfly Island to guard justice.
This spectrality, manifested through simulacra (void), knock-offs, and bubbles, deconstructs the totality or xenophobia represented by entities, authentic goods, and disinfectants, endowing Butterfly Island with a reality imbued with the spirit of biopolitical defiance. At the same time, it presents as an aesthetic or sensuous politics that harbors a sense of tragedy in the face of any relentless modernity. This is your future, not ours, because in the future foreseen by the ErGao, there is no refuge for Butterfly Island. Will there be a place for the butterfly princess who has traveled far from home (most of the costumes in “Butterfly Island” come from her Taobao shop)? Will there be a place for Sister Phoenix (Luo Yufeng)? Can these “women-butterflies” radiate the luster of pearls in the nights of foreign lands after crossing oceans, without having to fall to the ground like tears, or be threaded into necklaces in a workshop, valued at only a dozen yuan, to be worn around the neck of an out-of-town woman who can only afford fakes? The outdoor section of “Butterfly Island” concludes with the theme song “A Lifetime of Love” from “A Chinese Odyssey”, composed and sung by Lowell Lo. The actors pack up and sit in a row, like Paul Klee’s “New Angels”, bidding farewell to the audience and the doomed Butterfly Island. The door they turn and push open leads to a scene commonly depicted in films as the afterlife, a world ‘pure from the start and returning pure,’ where the audience, upon entering, can overlook the loves and hates, the unions and separations of the mortal world. The actors, now clad in white shirts and blue trousers, and the pearls scattered on the ground, no longer possess individuality; they are like a cluster of pristine white eggs, subject to the whims of the wind and the pushes of passersby, indifferent to the unevenness of the earth’s surface. At the end of the play, the actors truly and thoroughly say goodbye to the audience, their joyful expressions suggesting that they have either found the next Butterfly Island or believe in its existence.
In the geographic narrative of islands, they are always placed within a binary structure with the mainland, where the offshore island, being the farthest from the mainland or the main island, is thus the most decentralized. For butterflies on Butterfly Island to escape gravity, they must migrate to an island further than the last, dictating their migratory destiny. If viewed from a spatial coordinate perspective, the real reference for Butterfly Island is likely not Hong Kong Island, where its premiere took place, but rather a progressively distanced urban-rural fringe or urban village. This space is temporally isolated by political propaganda about the future, a stain unwelcome in the narrative of urban modernization. However, as urban villages gradually vanish (a common scenario in most cities), the urban-rural fringes primarily take on the role of a transit hub between city and countryside. The urban-rural interface and urban villages are always accumulating and flowing with the city’s waste and excreta, serving as a source of pathogens, a lawless zone rampant with piracy and knock-offs, a backdrop for grassroots video bloggers, and a pleasure market for cheap bodily transactions. They represent a complex, contradictory interweaving. Yet, this does not mean they are more real than the city center, for to assert so would fall into another form of essentialism. Urban villages or urban-rural fringes are merely part of our multifaceted reality. Similarly, Butterfly Island is one of the multiple islands in a parallel world, representing multiple futures under a reset history.
“Sinofuturism”, proposed after African Futurism and Gulf Futurism, introduces a non-Western futurism keyword. Lu Minglong’s eponymous film essay discusses seven stereotypes about contemporary China: computation, replication, learning, addiction, labor, gambling, labeling it an “unformed movement”. The promotion of the concept of Chinese Futurism overseas mainly relies on some overseas Chinese or diaspora identity artists and writers, who have long been away from mainland China. It is essentially an imagination of Chinese civilization, a distant aesthetic appreciation of “Made in China”, which also includes a reaction to the disillusionment with the West’s decline, leading to a new form of technological orientalism. Thus, terms like Pudong New Area, Alibaba, and Huaqiangbei, similar to the impressions of dragons, kung fu, and braids, reshape an image of China under accelerationism. The judgment on this acceleration, whether from a left-wing or right-wing discourse, directly or indirectly aligns with the political stance of some contemporary art. Despite attempts to depoliticize its premiere in Hong Kong, the inherent politics of kitsch, especially within a glamorous art gallery setting, with items mostly sourced from Yiwu, Huaqiangbei, and Taobao, evoke a “Mainland China Futurism”.
Subsequently, “Butterfly Island” toured under the post-human context at the Blanc Art Space in Beijing for the “More Than Human” exhibition, likely linked to ErGao’s work through the keywords of butterflies, oceans, and islands. They correspond to non-human perspectives of insects, non-human habitable marine ecosystems, and non-human dominated island politics, which may also be my forced interpretation. In this instance, “Butterfly Island”, under the name “Butterfly Island·Urban Village Tangram”, performed in the urban village of Nantou City in Shenzhen, coincidentally matches the sentiment discussed with ErGao that every island resembles an urban village. The group of butterflies that left Hong Kong has now migrated to the urban villages on the mainland, although Nantou Ancient City should not be the dirty, disorderly, and poor place I imagined, but rather a field of artistic experimentation. The difference lies in the transition from the live scene to the exhibition (re-presentation). On this note, I wish to initiate a self-imagined Butterfly Island, not necessarily located in Nantou Ancient City, but likely existing in a parallel universe, where the city serves as the sea, urban villages as islands, and all who are neither locals nor foreigners, but merely “strangers” passing by, act as the performers of Butterfly Island.
Shenzhen and Guangzhou still retain a small number of urban villages, which are rare in other “first-tier cities” (according to official standards). They are like many inland islands, i.e., islands in rivers or lakes, where some people living on these inland islands may not even know they reside on an island. The difference between “urban village-inland island” and “urban-rural interface-sea island” also represents the difference in centrality and marginality of power relations. The word “权”（power） originally meant the weight on a scale that moves back and forth, hence “权宜之计”(expedient measure) also refers to a temporary strategy, indicating that power is impermanent and constantly changing. Therefore, Butterfly Island, as a temporary habitat, is also a moving island. It can be passively pushed further from the land or actively move closer to or deeper into the hinterland. It’s not that the butterflies have found the next Butterfly Island, nor that the butterflies carry the Butterfly Island in flight, but rather, Butterfly Island inherently is the butterfly. Thus, the urban village is like a butterfly spreading its wings within the city, decentralizing the center, and transforming the mainland into an island. The people of the mainland may not yet realize that their place of living has been turned into Butterfly Island by a group of casually passing “strangers”, or butterflies that momentarily stay. This creates a bidirectional myth between the urban village and Butterfly Island.
However, such literary and performative descriptions as mentioned above face the suspicion of aestheticizing and idealizing the urban villages, raising questions about the identity of performance by artists in urban villages (Who creates art?) and the challenge of affective distribution by curators in these spaces (Who enjoys art?). Does “Butterfly Island” need to create dialogue in a real urban village? By “real”, it seems to imply an authentic, yet stereotyped urban village, while harshly criticizing those clean streets and people who offer typical social smiles, as if they are mere backdrops and actors within a set. But as previously noted, the chaos of urban villages may not necessarily be real, but part of a multiplicity of realities. It can reflect itself on those giant glass buildings under the sunlight, just as a well-known entrepreneur or celebrity might appear in the form of an infringing advertisement in a small clinic or eatery within the village. They are like “flower in the mirror, moon on the water” or “Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly”, leaving the observer unsure which is reality and which is the future. It is this plurality and layered multiplicity that makes urban villages a form of futurism distinct from techno-nationalism and techno-Orientalism, tentatively called Urban Villages Futurism.
Nearly twenty years ago, a movie popularized a chaos theory known as “the Butterfly Effect”, which suggests that even the smallest change can trigger a chain reaction within a system, leading to significant changes. It also illustrates that the development of everything is both traceable and mysteriously unpredictable. The tiny body of a butterfly, by flapping its wings, can split into multiple universes. Butterfly Island, with its simultaneous existence of joy and despair, like the urban villages filled with people of hope and hopelessness, also has many faces from apocalypse to the future. Just as no two butterflies have exactly the same pattern on their wings in this world, it is impossible to find one that is uniquely different from all others.
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