In Utopian theatre, miniature clay figures enact history-making scenes that have been transmitted to the world through the medium of television. Each is modelled as a miniature theatre or movie set, and accompanied by television monitors showing the events in ‘claymation’. The sculptural scenarios include a courthouse in session, a United Nations committee hearing and the busy Pudong district of downtown Shanghai. Among the familiar scenes are the calamity at the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001; an assassination in full view of a legion of camera crews; and a lone helicopter struggling to save a rural community from a landslide.

Zhou belongs to a generation of Chinese artists who have embraced technology in their work — in all its crafted, animated, edited and enhanced formulations. Yet he is also conscious of its less benign manifestations. Centring on issues of surveillance and the mass media, Utopian theatre is critical of the blind consumption of momentous events as public entertainment and conscious of technology's role in conveying such scenes.

Zhou Xiaohu is associated with the Long March Project, an art-related initiative established in 2002, which uses the historical Long March as a geographic and discursive framework.