A Printing Plant Worker
Li Xiaofei
李消非
Production date
2011
Object Detail
Media
video (colour, sound)
Measurements
6 min 58 sec
Notes
Since 2010, Li Xiaofei has been examining the phenomenon of mass production and its impact on social structures and the individual, within and beyond China. In his continuing Assembly Line Project, he has visited factories in southern China and throughout the world. Filming interviews with workers, supervisors and managers, Li has engaged with the reality of mechanisation, exploring the subject of labour and capital in original ways. Themes that emerge from this ambitious ongoing project include relationships between workers and management, between humans and machines, and between individuals and the larger society. Matter-of-fact discussions of pay and working conditions are constantly broken up in his videos by the roar of machinery, and the visually rich imagery of the assembly line, the rotation of gears and wheels, and spinning machine parts. Li Xiaofei raises many questions about the nature of work in the modern world.. A Printing Plant Worker (2011) starts with a close-up view of the machine stacking and compressing paper; the noise of the assembly line is much louder than the voice of the young man interviewed. Discussing his years of being underpaid, the exhausting hours, and the long commute between work and home he says, ‘There’s no way but to get used to it.’ Later, remarking on the difficulties of finding and maintaining relationships, the young man describes how he and his co-workers make friends online: ‘In real life, people often find that they are so busy they don’t have time to actually talk to each other.’ His responses are punctuated by long silences when he stares into space, apparently lost in thought. Li Xiaofei left the camera running without his subjects being aware of it, and they quite unselfconsciously retreat into a private space far from the mechanical cacophony of the workplace. These quiet moments, and the absence from the recorded interview of an interlocuter, emphasise the contrast between the public world of the factory and the private, interior worlds of these workers.
Accession number
2012.056