Cotton Empire

Creation Time: 2025 Size: 122x85x133cm Material: Polyurethane Spray foam, cotton, resin, steel pipes, seating, etc.

“Empire of Cotton” is a landscape narrative initiated by Song Jianshu after reading historian Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Using cotton as both a symbol and a clue, the work explores how capitalism expanded its influence through violence, exploitation, and globalization to construct a world economic system spanning centuries. Colonial plunder, global cooperation, and cultural conflicts interact deeply and complexly. As waves of globalization deepen and evolve, the empire of cotton has not disappeared today but has shifted with the changing world order—from Europe to the Americas and now to Asia.

This work, viewed through this lens, focuses more on human rights issues. It features a strange throne imbued with modernist intent—a chair designed with modernist language—upon which rests not so much a sitter but a skull wearing a “crown.” The skull symbolizes the oppressed and suffering souls within the cotton economic empire system. The mandible, painted gold and placed atop the skull, resembles a crown. As the main structural part of the mouth, the mandible represents survival (necessary for eating) and the power to speak (voice and discourse). The loss of the mandible, yet its ironic placement as a crown on the skull, creates a stark and poignant scene.

From the beginning, global capitalism was never founded on the myth of a free market or voluntary labor but grew through state violence, imperialism, colonial plunder, and extreme exploitation of the “other.” Even though the U.S. abolished slavery at the cost of a civil war, it never fundamentally challenged the essence of human rights and exploitation—that is, the unequal exchange of value. This exchange simply takes other forms, wrapped in institutional and legalized layers, enabling larger-scale and more effective plunder. Globalization, in essence, is a concrete manifestation of this capitalistic expansion of exploitation.

Today, the ghost of empire wanders in Asia’s emerging markets and rising latecomer nations, challenging the old imperial order. Yet, amid resource and power struggles and clashes of civilizations, human destinies are packaged as pure and soft cotton products. Has humanity’s fate truly improved?