Labor Record / 2: Labeling

Performance video, 3840 × 2160 pixels, color, sound

Labor duration: 4.5 hours

Labor date: 17 July 2023

All images courtesy the artist

In 2022, Zheng Que began her “Laogai Trilogy,” viewing “labor” as the means of transforming art production and the “artist” as an intermediary identity. She sought to encompass her artistic practice with labor experience. She has completed the first two parts, “Foot Massage” and “Factory Girl.”  In “Foot Massage,” she learned foot massage techniques and used the methods and approximate duration of foot therapy to shape clay sculptures. As she gained more experience, her sculptures gradually evolved. In “Factory Girl,” which began in 2023, she worked at a holiday gift and decoration factory in Pan’an County, Jinhua City, during the foreign trade season (July–September). She rotated through all positions on the production line: cutting, sewing, nailing, quality control, and packaging. The factory mainly exports products such as Easter hats, Halloween costumes, Christmas hats, and stockings. Over the three months, her artworks were transformed into small commodities and entered Western markets.

Zheng Que’s “Laogai Trilogy” has not yet been publicly displayed, but she has already envisioned her future exhibition. The project did not just result from her interest in labor, but from her own experience as an artist: becoming educated in the arts, studying at an art academy, and already working in the field. She seeks labor and a social context beyond art to confront the confusion and challenges that art presents to her. Although she uses the term “Laogai,” meaning “reform through labor”, which carries significant historical connotations in mainland China, she doesn’t extend the project to the “re-education” or “forced labor” experienced by intellectuals in the late twentieth century. Instead, she returns to a fundamental question: What does labor bring to a person, and what does it bring to art? 

LEAP: I was initially drawn to the term “laogai.” Originally, “reform through Labor” referred to intellectuals being re-educated, but in your case, it’s art that is being reformed. Why do you think art needs to be reformed?

ZQ: The term “laogai” was originally set up for counter-revolutionaries and intellectuals in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. After the Reform and Opening-up, it became a system of punishment for criminals. Although the former referred to specific classes, the core implicit meaning of the term is “atonement.” It places criminals in a specific set of production relationships, with the aim of reforming them through labor to become “new people.” I appropriated this term as the title of my trilogy because, first, it succinctly encapsulates the core idea of my project, and second, its critical implications in the Chinese context are self-evident. Besides, the phrase “reform through labor”, with “reform” as the core word, points to both my personal predicament and the broader crisis I see within contemporary art today.

I believe art needs to be reformed because, to some extent, contemporary art has fallen into a self-contained niche. It speaks only to itself within the white-cube space and is far removed from broader social realities and the life experiences of ordinary people. This somewhat narcissistic arrogance has led it to be presented in a vacuum, caught in a situation that feels almost like hitting a dead end repeatedly. I, too, face a similar predicament. The vacuum of urban life, or what sociologist Xiang Biao refers to as “suspension,” often makes me doubt whether my thoughts and expressions have objective value. I feel as if I am merely observing life rather than truly living it. I want to change, to do some practical work, to live genuinely. I don’t want to be a drifting leaf carried by the current, nor do I want art to merely be an outdated ornament.

However, “reforming art” is a grand vision. Despite the ambition implied in my project, I do not have the capacity to reform such a vast and complex system. That’s why I started from myself: labor first reformed and reshaped me, and naturally, it reformed my approaches to artistic production. The physical labor, with its painful transformation, prevents individual expression from becoming a mere grumble. Using “myself” as an example also illustrates the power of “reformation” more concretely, providing art with the potential to alert.

“Reformation” is neither about giving up nor compromise, but is a form of optimistic salvation. I like this kind of seemingly naïve optimism, which contains much hope and anticipation. At the same time, it also carries a metaphor of “atonement,” in line with the original meaning of the term, where physical labor redeems the authenticity of both art and life.

LEAP: How did the idea of using labor to reform art first come to you?

Zheng Que: I started noticing that people who do a lot of mental work often face a common problem—too much energy leads to overthinking. My mind is always racing with random thoughts. It’s like a tangled mess that grows and takes over, and the only time I can get it to stop is when my body starts moving. Also, I think I might be a bit like a dog—I need to get enough exercise every day to burn extra energy. Otherwise, I end up staying up all night, feeling restless. So, when I wanted to change my routine and focus my mind and body on something concrete, physical labor became the obvious answer. Labor makes work and production feel real—it pushes back against the emptiness of chasing meaning and allows the body to emerge clearly and concretely from murkiness.

Another reason I chose “labor” is because even though both mental and physical labor are forms of work, mental labor tends to earn more respect socially. And art is often seen as a high-level, intellectual pursuit. But I don’t think artists should be seen as privileged, isolated figures, separate from society. Joseph Beuys said, “everyone is an artist.” But today, is the title of “artist” really that important? I think artistic production should be on the same level as any other kind of work. Artists can be workers or farmers, and they can find creativity and meaning in labor. In fact, right now, when manual laborers are often looked down upon as “lower-class,” we should be rethinking labor. “Labor is the most honorable” shouldn’t just be a slogan (which was popular during the socialist era)—it should be a fact.

Also, when I was younger, I often heard stories from my family about prisoners being forced to dig earth—digging up one cubic meter of earth, filling it in, then digging it up again. It kind of felt like a Sisyphean punishment or even a spiritual practice. This stuck with me for years, like this nagging feeling that would pop up every now and then. Physical labor always seemed connected to repetition, and repetition felt like something boring, tedious, and meaningless. But the body is really honest. Different kinds of labor leave different kinds of muscles and memories on the body. Repetition completes the body in a way that I find really fascinating.

Foot Massage Tutorial

2024, Performance video, 3840 × 2160 pixels, color, sound, 45 minutes

Foot Massage #1-23

2022, Sculpture, Marble, 30 × 23 × 17 cm

LEAP: Does this project relate to your experience studying sculpture? Because in my stereotypical view, sculpture is indeed a medium that requires the body to handle large-scale materials.

ZQ: Yes, it’s definitely connected. The idea for the project actually started with a joke. There was a time when my finances weren’t great, and I wasn’t getting much work. I jokingly said to my roommate, “Making art sounds respectable, but making sculptures and doing foot massages are pretty much the same, except the masseuse probably makes more money than I do.” From that joke, I gradually developed the structure of the whole project, with physical labor as the core and the transitional role of art as the key concept—I find the word “art” very flexible, like a revolving door, where anything can come in and go out. In fact, the first two parts of the trilogy, “Foot Massage” and “Factory Girl,” are both related to sculpture. Both foot massage and sculpture involve the scale of the hands, and the factory I chose is a fabric gift processing factory, which uses techniques like surface adhesion and processing: methods with which I was already familiar from my time in university.

Even though my work now often presents itself through performance, video, text, and installations, my thinking is still based on sculpture. I emphasize the role of force and reaction. The three key words I focus on—space, locality, and humor—also come from sculpture. “Space” comes first because it’s always been the core issue in my work. Sculpture always presents itself as a finished product, but for the creator, the process is an incredibly concrete and physical labor, which has led to a deep affection for the presence of the body and a kind of obsession with process.

LEAP: Was it challenging to adapt your sculpting skills to foot massage?

ZQ: On a practical level, not really. When learning foot massage, you’re working with real human feet—skin rebounds under pressure, so there’s no need for the kind of visual judgment involved in shaping materials. The theoretical side, though, took me some time to get used to. At the Beijing Adult Massage School, the first lesson was purely theoretical, introducing four foundational principles of foot massage: the “holographic theory,” the “neuro-reflexology principle,” the “circulatory theory,” and the “meridian theory.” To put it simply, it’s all about “seeing the big picture in the small”: the foot is seen as a microcosm of the body, with the concept of “reflection” at its core—pressing on specific foot zones is believed to stimulate meridians and improve bodily circulation. This perspective was a bit jarring for me, as it contrasted significantly with my previous understanding of the human body.

Learning at the massage school was quite interesting. The age range in my class was vast, with the youngest student just 14 and the oldest over 60. Most of them were full-time students attending a three-month course covering massage and acupuncture. I joined as a transfer student and was the newcomer in class, but everyone was very welcoming. The lessons were quite different from my past educational experiences. Along with the professional stuff, they threw in a lot of practical tips, like how to pitch foot soaking products and little tricks to boost your sales. It was also my first time engaging in such intimate physical contact with teachers and classmates in a classroom. We formed groups of three, taking turns as foot massage models while the other two practiced—each working on one foot. The teacher would also use students as demonstration models, guiding us step-by-step, from washing feet to massage techniques. In sculpture training, the model is an untouchable object, and there’s a deliberate, professional distance upheld between students, teachers, and models. The sculpting studio operates with “distance” as a key principle—everyone stays in their space, focusing on their own work. But the foot massage classroom completely broke down that separation. The significant physical contact quickly erased any sense of hierarchy or boundaries, which, in turn, helped me integrate into the group much faster.

LEAP: It seems that in these two series of works, the long hours and high intensity of labor are crucial. Are you using this to create unconscious bodily memories that override your previous ones? In a way, your own body is the sculptural material here.

ZQ: Yes, the body is indeed the most direct material for sculpting or, you could say, “reform”. Only with long hours and intense labor can you cause physical deformation, making the body reveal itself. For example, my foot massage teacher and colleagues with many years of experience have larger finger joints from the constant pressure, and their hands are very strong. Many female workers also suffer from poor neck and lower back health due to prolonged sitting and looking down during their work. Older workers often show more serious signs of hunching. Since I’ve started working, my body has also undergone changes. When I was learning sculpture, because I was always pushing forward with both hands, my chest muscles became very developed, while my back strength remained weak, causing my shoulders to round slightly. In foot massage, my hand strength noticeably increased, and since I was always handling water, my skin also became rougher. At the factory, I often helped the factory manager with loading goods, which broadened my shoulders and increased the size of my deltoid muscles. My skin got tanned, and I looked more solid. The body exerts force outward during labor, and the resulting counterforce reveals the body’s contours, much like stone-carving: in a solid block of stone, you can see the figure of a person, and through carving, it is made to emerge.

In Iranian angelology, there’s an angel named Daena that accompanies us throughout our lives, changing with our every action, thought, and word. Only after death can we see its true form, which is the face reshaped by our entire life, the contours drawn by our actions. The body is typically the carrier of an artist’s subjectivity, through which they express various works. But in this project, I seem to be emphasizing the opposite: the body encounters deformation in the process and faces the situation of being reshaped—being transformed into an object. However, in the end, this body (and mind) being shaped and objectified becomes the subject that shapes the overall contours of life. How can one maintain self-awareness in the face of these experiences and consciously practice and refine oneself? I believe it should start with the body. After all, the body is the smallest unit that can be transformed.

Prototype cardboards in the factory

Breaking In (Still) 

2023–2024, 3840 × 2160 pixels, color, sound

LEAP: In “Factory Girl,” space is also a crucial consideration. You intentionally analyzed the relationship between the body and space, and already imagined about the spatial design and visitor flow for future shows. You once said, “I always try to ‘sew’ space onto my body through ‘action’, so that my emotions and memories have a safe ‘site’, like a slug constantly pretending to be a snail.”

ZQ: Space has always been a core issue in my work. It’s both fundamental and a boundary. When we talk about artistic expression, simply outputting ideas, no matter how brilliant, will only present a kind of narcissistic charm. What I want is something touching. What makes it touching is a sense of placement and call—because we share a common situation, in this moment and place. That situation is made up of various tensions between objects/bodies, space, and time. The tension between them is tied to the properties of objects/bodies, and the effectiveness of the presented form depends on their placement in space. It’s like a key entering a lock: only when it fits can the artistic expression evoke the corresponding feeling or atmosphere. So, studying space is essentially a study of the human being’s relationship to art. Without a container, there’s no content.

During my time at the factory, labor maximized the engagement of my body, directly affecting the flow of relationships between the body and space. How a factory allocates its space—how production materials and products occupy space—directly reflects the factory’s economic conditions. In a way, products exist to occupy space; the logic of a product is a form of spatial politics, and our bodies are the tools to be allocated. This difference is what gives “Factory Girl a different appearance from “Foot Massage,” despite both projects sharing the same underlying theme. The spatial concept in the exhibition is designed first to allow the audience to witness the presence of the body, and secondly, to connect the spatial struggle directly with the viewer’s body, creating a compressed spatial logic model.

Labor Record/1: Spreading and Cutting the Cloth (Still) 

Performance Video, 3840 × 2160 pixels, color, sound

Labor Duration: 2 hours

Labor Date: July 15, 2023

LEAP: In “Factory Girl,” the tension and balance between concepts and between people seem very important. Could you talk more about this?

ZQ: For artistic expression, the essential relationships were established at the very beginning, including art’s relationship to time, which was strictly set within the foreign trade season. Given my primary identity as a “female worker” and my secondary role as an “artist,” the work I did was both labor production and art production; the product, both a commodity and an artwork. In a situation where a young Chinese artist can’t break into the Western mainstream art market, I chose to let my work enter the Western market in the form of small commodities. This action is a kind of dark humor. Through this dark humor, I want to convey the subtle balance between art and economics, labor and consumption, within the context of globalization. This balance is explored through several pairs of interchangeable concepts surrounding labor and the body—such as the product vs. the artwork, assembly line labor vs. art production—and also through the relationship between myself and those to whom I am writing. My writings are excerpted from letters written to my mother, not from a diary or memoir.

There are two important relationships that were only gradually established after I actually went into the factory. 

The first relationship, which I briefly touched upon earlier, is the relationship between the body and space in labor. Our factory is a medium-sized one, not too big, with about 6,000 square meters of space. This space, divided by various labor functions, is vast but also fragmented. “Movement” is the defining feature of space, “labor” is the primary driving force, and “the body” serves as the medium through which labor acts on space. For example, when working in packing, at first, the pile of materials in front of me was enormous. Through my labor, the pile gradually shrank and narrowed. The products I completed were thrown behind me, and the pile grew larger until it surrounded me completely. It felt like I was performing a contemporary version of the “foolish old man moving mountains” (a fable in China), moving the pile from in front of me to behind me through labor. In the components-sorting job, because I had to sort components in different bags, I was constantly spinning around those bags, like a spinning top. In essence, the space was continuously shifted and filled as I worked. After three weeks, I moved on to sewing and gluing, and my body almost became a digestive system for the space: swallowing bundles of materials, processing them through labor (gluing, sewing), and then spitting them out as finished products on the ground. By the time I left, I had completely mastered the whole production process, from laying out the fabric to cutting, sewing, gluing, packing, quality checking, and, finally, loading the products. Besides this main workflow, the factory also had many small, auxiliary tasks hidden in the gaps between the production steps. These were nameless labor activities, like tying up cut fabric pieces, flipping over sewn, semi-finished products, and checking and distributing orders. Without actual work in the factory, it would be hard to imagine how specific and detailed these tasks were. Each labor task produced its own corresponding bodily form, and each form created a flowing spatial state.

Eating a watermelon together in the factory

Breaking In (Still) 

2023–2024, 3840 × 2160 pixels, color, sound

The second key relationship is the one between people. Labor in the factory isn’t an isolated task; it’s deeply embedded in a collaborative, community-driven environment. Our factory is a small, locally based operation, and most of the workers come from nearby villages. They’re not just colleagues, but also neighbors and friends—almost like a big work family. For example, during breaks, workers would often bring corn, fruit, or homemade snacks to share. When crab season arrived, we’d throw a big crab feast together in the office. Before I left, we even planned a family camping trip to the mountaintop. These relationships were grounded in everyday intimacy, far surpassing the impersonal, mechanical nature of assembly line work.

Sister Haifang taught me how to glue the cap balls and use the sewing machine, and even took me to local markets. I also went with Sister Xiaojiao, Sister Rongrong, and their kids to an amusement park. Sister Shasha drove me to the country for a bowl of Huainan beef soup. The factory manager often shared his dreams of road trips and his philosophy on running the factory. Even at my rented place, I swapped fruit with my neighbor and went to open-air movie screenings in the village. The villagers would pass me watermelon and sunflower seeds, and the village head would tell me about the local history. When I arrived in Pan’an, a ferris wheel was under construction on the mountain. Over the two months I was there, it went from a broken frame to a complete circle. I felt like I, too, was slowly rooting myself and growing in the area, just like that ferris wheel.

After leaving the factory in December, Sister Shasha texted me to say they had made new Christmas products and would send me some. When the package arrived, it contained Christmas apple boxes and two packs of “Liqun Soft Sunshine” cigarettes. This particular brand is a local staple in Zhejiang—you can’t even get “Chunghwa” (a more famous Chinese brand) here, it’s got to be Liqun. The factory manager himself doesn’t smoke or drink, but knowing I liked smoking, he made the effort to drive out and get them for me.

It’s always hard to express strong emotional connections in words, but the real experiences and feelings are so vivid. The “factory” used to be just a distant, fragmented image for me—an object that kept coming up in art narratives. But when I actually stepped into the factory, it wasn’t a label, a sample, or just a concept anymore. It became deeply intertwined with the land it was on and the people who lived there.

Still, I continue to question some of the limits of these relationships: Can I truly become one of them? Can my labor be completely detached from its artistic purpose? These questions have been with me throughout the entire project.

Amusement Park without electricity

Breaking In (Still) 

2023–2024, 3840 × 2160 pixels, color, sound

LEAP: How have these two works transformed art for you? How have massage and repetitive labor affected your art, and how a small factory has transformed the art gallery?

ZQ: That’s a really pointed question, and it gets right to the heart of my ambition. What I’ve been trying to do by blending labor production with art production is first to transform myself and then to transform my approach to making art. On a broader scale, I’m asking whether art can move away from elitism and exclusivity. Can we make art that’s more connected to everyday life—simpler, more honest, and more real? This effort is reflected in my research into the body, space, atmosphere, context, and materiality, all with the goal of creating something that doesn’t require “understanding” but can instead be directly felt.

In this sense, in the “Foot Massage” project, I tried to redefine the relationship between “technique” and “bodily perception.” In my sculptural work, I was once trained to focus on the “technique”—controlling materials and shaping forms with the tools in my hands. But massage doesn’t ask for “control”; it asks for “awareness.” It taught me to “listen” to the body, to feel its pressure, feedback, and rhythm. This sensitivity completely changed how I approach sculpture: creation is no longer a one-way output from the artist, but an equal dialogue with the material or subject. Factory labor strengthened this understanding. When I was repeating tasks like gluing, sewing, and packaging, my body started to memorize these movements. The mechanical nature of the work made “creation” less about personal expression and more about syncing up with a larger system of production. This shift helped me realize that art can evolve from chasing originality to focusing on the accumulation of shared experience of the body.

I’ve also been exploring a shift from “works” to “process.” The heart of both massage and repetitive labor is the process itself, not the final result. This experience made me question if art could move away from being defined by finished works and become something more dynamic and open. For example, in “Factory Girl,” the final product—the Christmas hats or Easter decorations—wasn’t as important as how the labor transformed my body and how these everyday objects became subjects in the field of art. I also want to see if space, as a medium, can be explored as a whole perceptual experience that replaces isolated works.

As for how a small factory can transform the art gallery, since the project hasn’t been fully realized yet, I’m still imagining it. But I believe both foot massage and factory labor bring in a completely different logic: efficiency, repetition, functionality, and the dynamic relationship between people and space. Traditionally, an art gallery is a sacred, independent space where the audience passively receives the artist’s message. A factory is the opposite—chaotic, fragmented, and full of everyday life. In “Factory Girl,” I tried to bring the factory’s production logic into the gallery space: by re-enacting the production process and replicating labor scenes, I wanted the audience to experience a direct, non-conceptual flow of space. At the same time, the audience and I are equally competing for space. When they push aside pieces blocking their path, their participation becomes active—not just passive engagement. This way, not only does my body emerge, but the audience’s body does too. And while factory production is all about efficiency and replicability, art traditionally values uniqueness and irreplaceability. “Factory Girl” flips that logic by turning art into a commodity. For example, a Christmas hat is both a cheap product on the assembly line and an artwork redefined by the artist’s labor. This blurring of boundaries makes us question what gives art its “value”—is it its originality, or the social context in which it’s placed?

Zheng Que is a mysterious urban beauty, known for her work in performance, installation, video, and text. Her creative practice revolves around three key concepts: space, locality, and humor. “Space” represents the problem, “locality” offers the perspective, and “humor” serves as the attitude.

Interviewed and translated by Nie Xiaoyi