There's no party to celebrate this opening (New Economy!), but Saturday at the Henry a new show goes up titled Business As Usual: New Video from China/Cao Fei and Yang Fudong.

In it are three videos, one by Cao and two by Yang. These two artists are fascinating figures. Cao is the daughter of a government-sponsored sculptor father, and she is intent on critique of the Chinese government and the hollow promises of the rapid economic development for the average person—but she's also keenly aware of the censors.

In her work Whose Utopia (2006), which is included in Business as Usual, the factory workers themselves are the co-authors, stars, and key audiences; it's not an abstract study of power simply for the gawking global art world. (There's much more on the interesting creation of Whose Utopia in a clear interview with Cao in fillip here.)

The workers, who have uprooted their lives to participate in the expanding Chinese economy by moving to work at a lighting factory in the Pearl River Delta, dance between glowering pieces of industrial machinery or wear elaborate costumes on the assembly line. They are filmed in their work environments but according to their own expressions; one who loves music adapts what he helps to make in the factory into an instrument; product is expanded. The tone is dreamlike. Here's a segment:

Yang is much more formalist; his seemingly endless five-part series Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003-07) follows stylish but stranded Chinese twentysomethings in nouveau-New Wave molasses style. It's an adaptation of a third-century story about Taoists who form their own retreat from corrupt government, but these camera-ready men (5) and women (2) demonstrate no certain sense of conviction or direction. They float picturesquely, but in a way that is deeply unsatisfying.

Seven Intellectuals is on display this summer in New York and isn't part of Business as Usual; this show includes two earlier works by Yang, City Lights and Honey.