Cao Fei’s first major institutional show in the UK, Blueprints features work from 2006–2020 and includes the premiere of her first virtual reality work, The Eternal Wave, produced in collaboration with Acute Art, and the UK premiere of new film Nova. At the centre of Cao Fei's exhibition is an impulse for world-building, to imagine and construct new universes for her characters that traverse past, present and future time frames. This mode of magical thinking leads to the creation of spaces that are both real and fictional, physical and virtual, a series of blueprints that takes us beyond a singular, everyday reality. This project is the third time that she has participated in the Galleries’ artistic programme; firstly, as part of China Power Station: Part 1, an offsite Serpentine exhibition at Battersea Power Station in 2006, where the artist presented her film Whose Utopia, and then in 2008, with the installation of RMB City in the Serpentine Gallery foyer. Accompanying Blueprints is a programme of cinema screenings of Cao Fei’s work in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, in partnership with Everyman Cinemas.
National Gallery Singapore - Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commission
17.01 - 25.10.2020
This is the fourth in the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commission series, which partners renowned artists who respond to and extend dialogue on and around the history of Southeast Asian art.
Photo credit: National Gallery Singapore
To be launched during the Singapore Art Week, Cao Fei, one of China’s foremost contemporary artists, will present a new large-scale kinetic sculptural installation, 浮槎 Fú Chá, at National Gallery Singapore, as part of the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commission. This marks an exciting departure for the artist who is primarily known for her moving image practice. Some of her known works include RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2007) that reimagines the future of China’s cities in online virtual world Second Life, and Asia One (2018) that examines technology’s effect on human relations. The artwork at National Gallery Singapore will also be the first of a set of solo presentations by Cao in the new year before her exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London and UCCA Beijing.
The title, 浮槎 Fú Chá, alludes to a fable about a raft that traverses the milky way and the sea. With a distinct artistic language that straddles reality and fantasy, Cao will present the first kinetic artwork shown at the rooftop garden. 浮槎 Fú Chá draws reference from the region’s history of migration, Singapore’s identity as a port city shaped by numerous diasporic communities, the fengshui of the rooftop garden, and the landmarks of the civic district that surround the Gallery.
Known for her social commentary on the rapid and chaotic changes occurring in Chinese and Asian societies today, Cao has had solo exhibitions at Centre Pompidou Paris (2019), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2018) and MOMA PS1, New York (2016), among other notable venues. The internationally renowned artist roots her projects in historical research, as well as art and film histories. At the same time, she embraces mass cultures like cosplay, games, popular music and social media to reflect on the human condition, and the realities of global flows in contemporary post-capitalist societies.
This is the fourth in the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commission series, which partners renowned artists who respond to and extend dialogue on and around the history of Southeast Asian art.
“This year Cao Fei became the first Chinese artist to have a solo show at Paris’s Pompidou, following on from a significant survey of her work at the recently opened Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, while next year she’s feted by the Serpentine Galleries and, on home turf, Beijing’s UCCA. ” — ArtReview
[AR]T Walks. Experience Augmented Reality at Apple
10.08.2019
Trade Eden (2019).
“Let people get involved in it, and enjoy it, and then they will think more.” - Cao Fei
"Let people get involved in it, and enjoy it, and then they will think more." - Cao Fei
Designed by Today at Apple, [AR]T brings together artists and curators, filmmakers and educators, in a collaborative initiative that pushes the creative potential of augmented reality.
Apple partnered with New York's pioneering New Museum in curating seven artists to craft original AR artworks. They live as a visual layer on the cityscape and are experienced via a walk with an iPhone in six major cities. The works — by Nick Cave, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, Cao Fei, John Giorno, Carsten Höller, and Pipilotti Rist — are experienced via a walk in Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo.
This presentation marks the international debut of Cao Fei’s long term research project
'Hong Xia’, and will also be the first ever solo exhibition of any Chinese artist at the
Centre Pompidou. Venue: Galerie 4 - Centre Pompidou, Paris.
This presentation marks the international debut of Cao Fei’s long term research project
'Hong Xia’, and will also be the first ever solo exhibition of any Chinese artist at the
Centre Pompidou. Venue: Galerie 4 - Centre Pompidou, Paris.
The artist Cao Fei with a photograph from her breakthrough work “Whose Utopia?” (2006), a 20-minute film shot in a light bulb factory in China. Photo by Bess Adler. Article by Farah Nayeri.
Upcoming screening: Prison Architect at Forum Expanded, 69TH BERLINALE
06.02.2019 - 10.03.2019
Cao Fei, Prison Architect, 2018. Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary
Prison Architect takes inspiration from the sombre histories of the Victoria Prison, located in the earliest penal structure complex built in Hong Kong under British colonial rules. Filming on site of the original prison, now the important part of Tai Kwun - the Centre for Heritage and Arts, opened in June 2018 after ten years of restoration work. The two protagonists: a prisoner and an architect living in parallel realities (in the present time and an ambiguous distanced past), conjure up imagination and experiences about imprisonment. And time presents the artist's debate on the relations of humans, the world, and freedom - the visible and the invisible imprisonment, existentialism as a means of self-redemption, and questioning at once the relationship of humans to the space around them. The artist's attempt at reconciliation with the world and human nature.
Prison Architect showing dates during Berlinale:
2019-02-08 20:00 Werkstattkino@silent green
2019-02-12 15:00 Arsenal 1
Upcoming exhibition: A hollow in a world too full at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong
08.09 - 09.12.2018
Cao Fei. Prison Architect, 2018. Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary.
Cao Fei's art is a study in exuberant ambiguity. Her early works were among the first to tackle the vibrant youth, factory, online, and regional cultures of the Mainland, capturing and reflecting upon the new kinds of human subjects and social relations that its economic transformation was making possible. Neither celebratory nor critical, and always with an eye for the surreal and the fun, her explorations propose characters and scenarios that question larger realities by deviating from them, creating hollows—spaces for suspended reflection—in a fast-moving world full of people, objects, and ideologies.
This exhibition, Cao Fei’s first large institutional exhibition in Asia, revolves around a newly commissioned film that engages directly with Tai Kwun's layered history. Prison Architect unfolds as a poetic dialogue across time between two characters—a prisoner and an architect—who represent the building complex’s past as a police, judicial, and penal institution and its future as a cultural institution. Shown in an installation setting designed to embody this same complexity, the film makes references to colonial history, Hong Kong cinema, and the contemporary on the Mainland and globally, asking if we as viewers might be, like the inmates who inhabited this place before us, waiting indefinitely for trials to come.
An Artist Warns of a Robot-Ruled Future. Or Is It Our Present? Let’s Discuss, NY Times
23.08.2018
David Barboza, left, a former Times Shanghai bureau chief, and the art critic Jason Farago watching “Asia One,” a video by Cao Fei that is part of the “One Hand Clapping” exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Image credit: Marian Carrasquero. Article by Jason Farogo.
Yuk Hui, Cao Fei and Peter Gorschlüter.
Thursday, May 24, 11:30am (CET) at MMK 3
EXTREME. NOMADS. Artist Talks / Panels
Thursday, May 24, 11:30am (CET)
Yuk Hui, Cao Fei and Peter Gorschlüter
Venue: MMK 3, Domstraße 3, 60311 Frankfurt am Main
Exhibition period: May 24 - Sep 9, 2018
In her works, Cao Fei processes the profound social changes that occurred in her homeland China as a result of rapid economic growth and globalisation. Inspired by the US-American zombie films, the artist presents her work Haze and Fog. This is a fictional portrayal of a service-based society that is suffering from a loss of identity and transforms one of the newly built residential areas on the threshold of Beijing into a hoard of restless zombies.
Upcoming exhibition: One Hand Clapping at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
04.05.2018-21.10.2018
Cao Fei, Asia One, 2018. Multichannel color video installation, with sound, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York for the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative
Cao Fei, Asia One, 2018. Multichannel color video installation, with sound, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York for the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents One Hand Clapping, a group exhibition of newly commissioned works by Cao Fei, Duan Jianyu, Lin Yilin, Wong Ping, and Samson Young. The exhibition is the third of the Robert HN Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative, a research, curatorial, and collections-building program begun in 2013. On view from May 4 through October 21, 2018, One Hand Clapping will be accompanied by a catalog and public and educational programming. On Tower Level 7, Cao Fei examines the new realities and potential crisis driven by automation and robotics at some of China's most advanced storage and distribution facilities. More info:Guggenheim website Cao Fei’s Storyboards and Stills Give a Glimpse of Her Dreamlike New Video by Caitlin Dover
Upcoming exhibition at K21, Düsseldorf
06.10.2018 - 13.01.2019
In cooperation with MoMA PS1, New York, and the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf/Berlin.
The K21 is presenting the first comprehensive exhibition in Germany devoted to the Beijing-based artist Cao Fei. The featured videos, photographs, and multimedia installations by this pioneer of the post-internet-generation are representative of her artistic oeuvre as a whole. Oscillating between reality and fiction, her art reflects upon China's societal and urban situation, characterized today by continual and massive change. Cao Fei (*1978) draws upon her local and personal milieu in Beijing, at the same time integrating traditional Chinese rituals into her work. She exploits the latest digital media for projects that alternate visually between the aesthetic realms of documentary, feature film, and virtual reality.
In cooperation with MoMA PS1, New York, and the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf/Berlin. More info: Kunstsammlung NRW website
BMW ART CAR #18 RACE DEBUT AT THE FIA GT WORLD CUP IN MACAU
18.11.2017-19.11.2017
Sunday, Nov 19, 12:10-13:40 at Macau Grand Prix
BMW Art Car #18 by Cao Fei
Cao Fei’s work is a reflection on the speed of change in China, on tradition and future. With her BMW Art Car project, she delves into a trajectory spanning thousands of years, paying tribute to Asia’s ancient spiritual wisdom as it swiftly spreads into the third millennium. The multimedia artist approached the BMW Art Car in a way typical of her artistic practice, building a parallel universe. The body of work consists of three different components: a video focusing on a time travelling spiritual practitioner, augmented reality features picturing colourful light particles, accessible via a dedicated app (App Store: keyword “BMW Art Car #18”), and the BMW M6 GT3 racecar in its original carbon black. Paying tribute to the carbon fibre structure of the racecar chassis, Cao Fei’s holistic use of a non-reflective black incorporates the car into the possibilities of the digital world. Within this concept, Cao Fei’s implementation of video art, as well as augmented reality, creates an environment of which the BMW M6 GT3 isan essential part. In her video work, the practitioner executes spiritual movements, which echo in colourful streams of light. When the app is used within the premises of the car, these light swishes become an AR installation floating above and around the BMW M6 GT3 –involving the spectator as an interactive agent of participation.
Macau Grand Prix - FIA GT World Cup Final race on Sunday, Nov 19, 12:10-13:40 More info: BMW Blog
K11 x MoMA PS1: .com/.cn Exhibition Artist Talk
08.11.2017
Wednesday, Nov 8, 4-5pm at chi K11 art museum Shanghai
.com / .cn Artist Talk
Wednesday, Nov 8, 4-5pm
Curators: Klaus Biesenbach and Peter Eleey
Venue: chi K11 art museum, B3, K11 Art Mall, 300 Huaihai Road Central, Huangpu District, Shanghai
Exhibition period: Nov 9, 2017 - Jan 3, 2018
How is art changing in the digital era? Technology has provided new tools for the production, distribution and reception of art while also enabling rapid advancements in global trade and information exchange. Described as a "network" or a "cloud", the infrastructure that facilitates this digital ecosystem is often assumed to exist as a universal system unencumbered by territory, language, law or national culture. And yet very different forms of the internet have clearly throughout the world, conditioning different social behaviors, economies and modes of thought. These variations are perhaps most sought when comparing the internets of China and the West, which reflect broader competing political and economic systems. How might these different technological environments express themselves in the contemporary art being made "locally"? More info: K11 Art Foundation
Cosmopolis Shanghai Forum 2017 Reset the Time: Art, Technology & Speculative Aesthetics
08.11.2017
Day 2 Roundtable Discussion, Wednesday, Nov 8, 10:30am to 12:30pm at Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM)
Day 2 Roundtable Discussion - Time Machine: Art in the Age of Acceleration
Wednesday, Nov 8, 10:30am to 12:30pm
Venue: Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM), No. 436 East Yonghe Road, Jing'an District, Shanghai
Host: He Jing
Cao Fei
Yuk Hui
Wang Jianwei
This new Biennale will be an unprecedented international event designed to explore the latest contemporary art practices. The new Biennale will be an unprecedented international event in new booming non-Western cities which will be inaugurated on October 18th 2017. The two-month event will focus on art and social progress, global urbanization and geopolitical challenges of our times in order to promote meaningful thinking and dialogue. In addition to a large exhibition in Paris, there will be a series of activities designed to create a platform allowing interactions with the public and better knowledge sharing globally. Part of the exhibition will travel to China during the spring of 2018.
Ahead of the actual exhibition, as a Chinese echo to the Biennale opening in Paris, the Mao Jihong Arts Foundation, Center Pompidou and Fu Dan University resolved to jointly organize the Cosmopolis Shanghai International Forum. During this two-day thematic event entitled "Reset the Time ", well-known philosophers and artists with a far-reaching influence in the field of aesthetic ideology will be invited to Shanghai. Together with Chinese scholars and representatives of the arts community, they will hold public lectures and seminars around the subject of" Art, Technology & Speculative Aesthetics "
In recent years, fast high-tech developments have triggered innovative changes in social conditions around the world, influencing the way the art world faces cultural and political conflicts, mutations and bringing more developments into artists' exploration of transversal fields, such as technological evolution, network and post-Internet society, environment, Anthropocene, Accelerationism and Object-oriented ontology. "Another major trend is that three decades of globalization and non-Western countries' dynamism have convinced artists to sharpen their thinking and deepen their research about" modernity's diversity ".
With such global background, the Cosmopolis forum ambitions to help us upgrade our vision - from the technical, social and economic level to the philosophical level - to better face the future. It wants to make clear that the core issue of social changes lies in "fundamental changes in time awareness", as well as in the non-linear theory about time development and in the way both impact artistic creation. The forum also hopes to further explore whether such philosophical concepts can bring new thinking patterns in non-Western modernity studies and whether it can promote interaction between philosophy, asthetics and the arts.
Organizers: Center Pompidou, Mao Jihong Arts Foundation, Fu Dan University
Joint-organizer & Co-organizer: Ming Contemporary Art Museum
Q BERLIN QUESTIONS: Imagine yourself as the other self. How do we embrace tolerance and difference?
19.10.2017
Thursday, Oct 19, 12:00noon at Schiller Theater Berlin
Imagine yourself as the other self. How do we embrace tolerance and difference?
Thursday, Oct 19, 12:00noon at Schiller Theater Berlin
How can the peaceful coexistence of different cultures and lifestyles be supported? What do politics, civil society and business have to do to do this?
Venue address: Schiller Theater Berlin, Bismarckstraße 110, 10625 Berlin
Between Past and Future: Art of the Pearl River Delta
07.09.2017
Thursday, Sep 7, 6:30pm at Miller Theater, Asia Society
Between Past and Future: Art of the Pearl River Delta
Thursday, Sep 7, 6:30pm at Miller Theater, Asia Society
Part of the on-going M+ Matters series of public talks and discussions, Between Past and Future: Art of the Pearl River Delta welcomes keynote speakers Hou Hanru (Artistic Director, MAXXI) and Chan Koonchung (Writer) to present and participate in a panel discussion with Cao Fei (Artist), Chen Tong (Founder, Libreria Borges), Feng Yuan (Professor, Sun Yat-sen University) and Sara Wong (Artist and Co-Founder, Para Site). The symposium examines the trajectory of urbanisation in the Pearl River Delta since China was opened up for economic reform in the late 1970s, looking at how the phenomenon has shaped the development of art and culture in the region and its relevance for today’s socio-political context.
Venue address: Miller Theater, Asia Society Hong Kong Center, 9 Justice Drive, Admiralty, Hong Kong
Panel Discussion Participating Artists: Cao Fei (Artist); Chen Tong (Founder, Libreria Borges); Feng Yuan (Professor, Sun Yat-sen University); Sara Wong (Artist and Co-Founder, Para Site)
Wednesday, May 31, 8 pm at Beijing Minsheng Art Museum
"Light
is a manifestation of thoughts in one’s mind. If the speed of thoughts cannot
be measured, then the #18 Art Car poses a question to the existence of a
boundary to the human mind. We are entering a new age, where the mind controls
objects and thoughts can be transferred (unmanned operations, artificial
intelligence). Which attitudes and temperaments hold the key to opening the
gateway to the new age? " Cao Fei
The Instant Image for the Global Audience, Art for Tomorrow, Doha
10-13.03.2017
Sunday, March 12, 10:30am at W Doha Hotel & Residences
The Instant Image for the Global Audience
Sunday, March 12, 10:30am at W Doha Hotel & Residences It used to be said the camera never lies. Now any image can be changed, embellished, remixed and reimagined. Nothing is static. Artists practicing at the intersection of social media and traditional processes present their work directly to their audience in a subversion of the traditional indirect relationship between artist / curator / viewer.
Cao Fei, Best Artist Award 2016 by CCAA (Chinese Contemporary Art Award)
15.11.2016
The 10th CCAA Artist Award (2016) is held in Beijing from Nov. 13 to No. 15, 2016.
The 10th CCAA Artist Award (2016) is held in Beijing from Nov. 13 to No. 15, 2016. More info: CCAA Website
President of the jury: Liu Li Anna. Seven jury members including Bernard Blistène (Director of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris), Chris Dercon (Emeritus Director of Tate Modern in London), Feng Boyi (Independent Curator, Art Critic, Art Director in He Xiangning Art Museum), Peng De (Professor & Ph.D adviser, Xian Academy of Fine Arts), Suhanya Raffel (Director Designate of M+, Hong Kong), Uli Sigg (Founder of CCAA, Collector) and Yin Jinan (Professor, Ph.D adviser and Dean of Humanities Department, CAFA).
SAIC Visiting Artists Program - Open Lecture
01.09.2016
Thursday, September 1, 6:00 p.m. The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium
Thursday, September 1, 6:00 p.m.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium
230 S. Columbus Dr.
FREE, non-ticketed, and open to the general public
MoMA PS1 presents the first museum solo show in the United States of Beijing-based artist Cao Fei
04.2016-08.2016
Image still from Haze and Fog (2013)
MoMA PS1 presents the first museum solo show in the United States of Beijing-based
artist Cao Fei. One of the most innovative young artists to have emerged from China, Cao
Fei creates multimedia projects that explores the reality of the young Chinese generation
and their strategies for overcoming and escaping the challenging routine in rapidly
changing society. Mixing social commentary, pop aesthetics, references to Surrealism, and
documentary conventions in her films and installations, the artist reflects on the rapid and
chaotic changes occurring in Chinese society.
Organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director, MoMA PS1, and Chief Curator at Large, The
Museum of Modern Art, with Jocelyn Miller, Curatorial Associate, MoMA PS1.
Two swings fall from the ceiling and twosets of drums are fixed on the sidewalls in 90 degrees. Performers swing backand forth to the closest distance of the wall, trying to strike the instrumentswith their furthest body parts.
There are times she kicked the snare drum,and times she touched the crash cymbal with her toe. Wavering, playing out dulland crystal clear sound, they might hit nothing or they might have spontaneous,broken noise aroused continuously between them. It could be monotonous or aresonance. The room turns into solitude when they are exhausted. The nextmoment she rushes in to break the silence. September 26 - November 8, 2015
Cao Fei: Shadow Plays, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles
16.09.2015 - 21.11.2015
Cao Fei (SL: China Tracy), RMB City Planning: Online Project in Second Life (2007-2011)
Shadow Plays will bring together two projects - Haze and Fog (2013) and RMB City (2007-2011). The exhibition explores Cao Fei’s investigations of the intensities and peculiarities of contemporary urban life in China.
The Urban Imaginary, World Economic Forum, Dalian, China
Dalian time: 09.09.2015 17:00-18:00
Join a conversation with artist and filmmaker Cao Fei, whose work presents imaginary and dystopian visions of China's urban future.
This session includes the screening of Whose Utopia?, a poetic exploration of urban growth and transformation through the daily lives of workers in a Chinese lighting factory, as well as excerpts of her other cinematic work.
At the Vienna Secession, Cao Fei will show a selection of works, among them key works such as RMB City project (2008–11) or Haze and Fog (2013), a recent film project that depicts the struggles of the disoriented urban middle class in a dystopian zombie setting. The artist has also conceived new works especially for the exhibition, among them the eponymous intervention on the Secession’s façade, which creates a connection between the original building in Vienna and its copy, home to a real estate business, in Fei’s hometown, Guangzhou. In the video installation Stranger (2015), Cao Fei explores the phenomenon of internet dating platforms which,while individuals seem to feel more and more disconnected to their surroundings, are becoming increasingly popular. Instead of meeting common expectations,the artist as invisible protagonist of the video clips performs everyday activities as form of communicating with the often passive voyeur, while in the installation Rumba (2015) automatic household devices like cleaning robots perform a kind of random choreography set on a stage designed as an abstracted landscape. Here, again, communication as in “building bridges” seems to be an underlying theme.
An artist book with texts, drawings and sketches by Cao Fei will be published to coincide with the exhibition.
The exhibition at Secession is the artist’s first solo show in Austria.
Cao Fei, born in Guangzhou (China) in 1978, lives and works in Beijing.
Invited by the board of the Secession
Curator: Jeanette Pacher
Press
Press conference: July 1, 10am
For interview requests and any other questions please contact katharina.schniebs@secession.at.
Cao Fei will light up the entire façade of Hong Kong's iconic ICC building with a major new work
Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei has set her sights on Hong Kong's International Commerce Centre building in Kowloon, where a large-scale LED installation will display images from 1980s video games every night as part of next week's Art Basel.
For Cao Fei's installation, "Same Old, Brand New," symbols, logos and moving images from video games such as Pac-Man and Tetris will play out on the facade of the 490-meter-high ICC in five 10-minute sessions every night from March 13-17.
For those in Hong Kong, recommended viewing spots include the terrace on Podium 3 and 4 of the IFC Mall, where an accompanying audio piece by Hong Kong sound artist Dickson Dee will evoke music from 1980s computer games, as well as Tamar Park and Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park.
Commissioned by Art Basel and ICC, the installation is part of a larger program called the ICC Light and Music Show, which consists of a series of spectacles that are said to be the largest light and sound shows on a single building.
Whose Utopia, Poetry and Dream, Tate Modern, London
2014.10.25 - 2015.04.25
Cao Fei's Video Whose Utopia (2006) now on Display at Tate Modern
Theme: Level 2: Poetry and Dream (collection exhibition of Tate)
Room: Cao Fei (Room 2)
more info: Tate
Cao Fei's Haze and Fog screening at Prospectif Cinéma, Centre Pompidou, Paris
2014.10.30
Haze and Fog (2013)
30 Oct, 2014
Cinema 1 - Centre
Pompidou, Paris
€ 6, € 4, free LP
The Chinese
artist Cao Fei works with video, 3D animation, photography, as well as
platforms through its Second Life avatar "China Tracy". She builds
her works from reflections on Chinese society, using references to the
fantastic and integrating performative elements related to contemporary dance.
Her latest film Haze and Fog (2013) reflects the discomfort of living in a invaded by the
video game industry and consumerism society, symbolized for the artist by a
thick fog. She invented in response to a parallel universe with zombies who
fully live their desires and emotions.
Curated Mnam /
Bcc - contemporary and prospective service creation, Christine Macel
L’artiste
chinoise Cao Fei travaille avec la vidéo, des animations 3D, de la
photographie, ainsi que des plates-formes sur Second Life à travers
son avatar « China Tracy ». Elle construit ses oeuvres à partir de réflexions
sur la société chinoise, en utilisant des références au fantastique et en intégrant
des éléments performatifs liés à la danse contemporaine. Son dernier film Haze
and Fog (2013), don du Cercle international de la Société des Amis du musée et présenté
lors de cette séance, témoigne du malaise de vivre dans une société envahie par
l’industrie des jeux vidéo et la consommation à outrance, symbolisé pour l’artiste
par un brouillard épais. Elle invente en réaction un univers parallèle avec des
zombies qui vivraient pleinement leurs envies et émotions.
Commissaire :
Mnam/Cci - Service création contemporaine et prospective, Christine Macel
Cinéma et Vidéo
30 octobre 2014, à
20h00
Cinéma 1 - Centre
Pompidou, Paris
6€, 4€, LP
gratuit
Cao Fei's Haze and Fog screening at Gene Siskel Film Center, School of Art Institute of Chicago
2014.10.23
Cao Fei: Haze and Fog
2014.10.23.
Gene Siskel Film Center, School of Art Institute of Chicago.
Cao Fei, China, ca. 80 min.
Chinese artist Cao Fei mixes fantasy, documentary, and virtual reality to reflect on the ways China’s rapidly changing economy has transformed the everyday lives and imaginations of its citizens. Her latest film, HAZE AND FOG (2013), is a darkly humorous reinterpretation of the zombie film, set in Beijing. Here the undead are real estate agents, nouveau riche businessmen, security guards, manicurists, and sex workers seeking contact in an increasingly individualized, alienating society. Fei accompanies the film with her 2007 short i.MIRROR, which follows her avatar China Tracy as she navigates the alternate reality of Second Life. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Various formats. (Amy Beste)
La Town, Cao Fei's Solo Exhibition, Lombard Freid Gallery, New York
2014.09.10 - 2014.10.25
La Town, Trailer (1'31"), 2014
Cao Fei: La Town
Solo Exhibition
September 10 – October 25, 2014
Vernissage: Wednesday, September 10, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
———————
Indeed, this simulacrum remains unsurpassed in its evocation of the Real.
Indeed, this film conveys the Truth.
I will always mourn for the fate of La Town, for La Town is always in mourning.
– Cao Fei
———————
Lombard Freid Gallery is pleased to present La Town, Cao Fei’s fifth solo show with the gallery. An ambitious stop-motion feature, La Town exemplifies the artist’s playful-yet-political practice, converging fantasy and reality into a film noir-inspired vision of the contemporary China and the World at large. The trailer for the film was well received at Art Basel Hong Kong 2014, and is followed by the full-length film and related photographic series.
Cao Fei's Theatrical Mirror, Contemporary Art Center of South Australia
2014.09.14 - 2014.10.20
Cao Fei’s
Theatrical Mirror: Living Between the Real and the Unreal
Presented by
Adelaide Festival Centre and the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia
(CACSA)
Internationally
recognised Chinese artist Cao Fei presents Adelaide audiences with Theatrical
Mirror: Living in-between the Real and the Unreal, featuring eight
videoworks spanning the years 2004 to 2013. These video and new media
works reflect the fluidity of a world in which cultures have mixed and
diverged in rapid evolution, exploring perception and reality in places as
diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of “Second Life”. Depictions
of hyper-capitalistic Pearl River Delta development abound in imagery that
echoes traditional Chinese landscape painting and in the design of her own
virtual utopia, RMB City.
Applying
strategies of sampling, roleplay and documentary film making Cao Fei reveals
the discrepancy between reality and dream, and the discontent and
disillusionment of China’s younger generation.
Cao Fei's Haze and Fog, The 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale
2014.05.16 – 2014.08.31
8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, Shenzhen, China
OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT) Shenzhen announce the artists who will participate in the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, open May 16–August 31, 2014. The works selected for the Biennale elicit subtle levels of involvement, whether by inviting action, reflection, critique or contemplation, based on the free judgment of the viewer. The selected artworks use references to everyday occurrences, to modest and neglected aspects of our lives, to seemingly ordinary spaces, structures or architectures as a way of giving aesthetic form to diverse social realities.
The artists and collectives participating in the Biennale and its public programme include Cao Fei, Chen Chieh-jen, Chen Shaoxiong, Chen Yufan & Chen Yujun, Cheng Ran, Geng Jianyi, Gran Fury, Huang Po-Chih, Takahiro Iwasaki, Jia Chun, Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Meiro Koizumi, Lai Chih-Sheng, Marc Lafia, Michael Lee, Li Jinghu, Li Ming, Ahmet Öğüt, L+ (Pak Sheung Chuen, Wo Man Yee, Lee Soen Long), Sheila Pepe, Adrian Piper, Polit Sheer Form Office, Tsong Pu, Younès Rahmoun, Manuel Saiz, Song Ta, Wu Mali, Xu Tan, Morgan Wong, Yao Jui-chung with LSD, Qiu Zhijie & Song Zhen with Diankou residents and Total Art Studio, Héctor Zamora and Zheng Bo. OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT)
F2, Enping Road, Overseas Chinese Town
Nanshan District, Shenzhen
China
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Is Utopia for Sale? MAXXI Museum, Roma, Italy
2014.02.15 – 2014.05.04
15 February – 4 May 2014
Gallery 5
curated by Hou Hanru and Monia Trombetta
with contributions of the curatorial teams of MAXXI art and MAXXI architecture
Cao Fei's Haze and Fog at Chinese Art Centre, Manchester, UK
2013.10.25 - 2013.12.07
The film Haze and Fog(2013) is Cao Fei’s most ambitious moving image work to date and is a joint commission, the inaugural work to be acquired for the New Chinese Contemporary Art Collection, the first in the UK created in partnership with the University of Salford. This new initiative builds on the strengths of both institutions, commissioning emerging Chinese artists, developing work for the collection that will aim to increase knowledge and interest in Chinese contemporary art across the UK and internationally. The collection will be officially launched on 11th October at Media City UK, Salford.
‘Haze and Fog’ was produced by Eastside Projects (Birmingham) and Vitamin Creative Space (China) and is commissioned in partnership with Eastside Projects, Arnolfini (Bristol), Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University. The film will also be exhibited at Eastside Projects (Birmingham) from 21st September – 16th November, screened at Tate 22nd September, and at Arnolfini (Bristol) as part of a series of events profiling the artist’s work.
Cao Fei: What are you doing here? Body-book, The 9th Bienal do Mercosul, Brazil
2013.09.13 - 2013.11.10
A tree on which uniforms are hung, street clothes, photographs of factory staff, drawings made by workers in 2005 and 2006—when Cao Fei approached employees of OSRAM Lighting China Ltd in Guangdong—: all this forms part of a new installation conceived by the artist in the continuous process of reflecting on her experience involving the project What Are You Doing Here?
The German company Siemens is chiefly concerned with the engineering and electronics industries. In 1987, it launched the Siemens Art Program, seeking to establish a dialogue between employees and artists. From 2000 to 2006, under the title What Are You Doing Here?, the program asked a series of artists in China, including Cao Fei, to organize projects in collaboration with employees of Siemens’s subsidiaries in that country. The workers were then asked to reflect on their own work environment and to get actively involved in the artists’ work process.
Another physical manifestation of Cao Fei’s dialogue with the workers is the video Whose Utopia. With a slower pace and piano music accompanied by a guitar that sounds interspersed with working machines, dancers shown running harmonic movements in positions similar to those of birds, including rigorous scenes of work, surrounded by machines and still lifes surely full of boxes containing bulbs to illuminate.
The 9th Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre takes place from September 13 to November 10, 2013, in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. It consists of an exhibition of contemporary art, including performances and events of various kinds, presented in different venues across the city. Its pedagogical program, Cloud Formations, started on May 17, 2013, along with special public programs and film screenings.
Film still, Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space
Haze and Fog is a new type of zombie movie set in modern China. The film explores how the collective consciousness of people living in the time of what Cao Fei calls ‘magical metropolises’ emerges from seemingly tedious, mundane, day-to-day life where a magical reality is created through struggles at the tipping point between the visible and the invisible. This special preview screening will be followed by a discussion with the artist.
Haze and Fog is produced by Eastside Projects and Vitamin Creative Space. It is commissioned by University of Salford and Chinese Art Centre, Eastside Projects, and Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University, with Vitamin Creative Space. An edition will be the first piece in the New Collection of Chinese Contemporary Art developed by University of Salford and Chinese Art Centre and will launch the collection partnership with a showing of the film in Media City on 11 Oct 2013. Cao Fei: Haze and Fog is at Eastside Projects, Birmingham 21 September – 16 November 2013
Cao Fei's HAZE AND FOG at Eastside Projects, Birmingham
2013.09.21 - 2013.11.16
'Haze and Fog’ is a new type of zombie movie set in modern China. The film will explore how the collective consciousness of people living in the time of what the artist calls “magical metropolises” emerges from seemingly tedious, mundane, day-to-day life where a magical reality is created through struggles at the tipping point between the visible and the invisible.
A new commission by Eastside Projects, Salford University/Chinese Art Centre, and Bath School of Art & Design, with Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing.
Cao Fei's EYELINER exhibited at Pinchuk Art Center "China China"
2013.05.18 - 2013.10.06
Cao Fei's new work Eyeliner(2013) create an oasis of rest within the heart of the exhibition. It becomes a bookstore where the visitor is invited to "take time" to discover recent history and to daily life in China from the stories behind the clothing she created.
Shadow Life (2011), Whose Utopia (2006) participated Home Works 6, Beirut
2013.05.14 - 2013.05.26
Home Works 6, its multidisciplinary forum on cultural practices which takes place every 2–3 years in Beirut. Cao Fei's 2 video works: Shadow Life (2011), Whose Utopia (2006) will be participated.
The exhibition program for Home Works 6 adopts strategies of spatial and temporal transferences, reenacting three key exhibitions that took place at transitional moments in history: the first Alexandria Biennial in 1955; the First Arab Art Biennial in Baghdad in 1974; and the exhibition China/Avant-Gardein Beijing in 1989. Inspired by Ibn Arabi’s concept of time as a fluid place and place as a frozen time, the exhibition examines the locations and conditions of the present, which finds itself once again at a historical juncture. The exhibition summons the past and present of Baghdad, Alexandria and Beijing to Beirut 2013, suggesting leaps among these different epochs and locales, and among the basic laws that have governed (and continue to govern) our culture and our thought. The exhibition does not seek to redraw a historical map. Rather, it presents a body of contemporary artworks against three crucial events—all of which were fuelled by important political, social and artistic movements—as a layer in time and place that is at once conductive and disruptive.
The Museum of Modern Art: Chinese Realities / Documentary Visions, May 8 - June 1. 2013
This series aims to reflect the evolution of documentary practice in China over the past 25 years, revealing the growth and ever-increasing influence of nonfiction film and media. The selections, encompassing a wide expanse of Chinese film and media, including state-approved productions, underground amateur videos, and Web-based Conceptual art, provide a vivid look into a society in perpetual transformation. Some screenings will be presented by the filmmakers and scholars.
Organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and Kevin B. Lee, independent curator and Vice President, Programming and Education, dGenerate Films.
Inflation! West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong
2013.04.25 – 2013.06.09
Cao Fei: House of Treasure
An exhibition of giant inflatable sculpture on the site of M+, Hong Kong' s future museum for visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Participating artists: Cao Fei (P.R of China); Choi Jeong Hwa (South Korea); Paul McCarthy (UK);Lukas Tam Wai Ping (Hong Kong); Jiakun Studio (P.R of China); Museo Aero Solar(Germany). In terms of scale, this is the largest contemporary art exhibition ever to be mounted in Hong Kong. Inflation! has been planned as a prelude to the planned fourteen hectare future Art Park in the District, with the aim of stimulating debate around the transformative power of art in the public realm, specifically in park design. The exhibition will also physically open up the undeveloped site, allowing the public to explore the parkland and consider the impact of the Art Park on Hong Kong's cultural landscape.
Inflation! continues the series of pre-opening 'nomadic' exhibitions curated by M+, marking the beginning of the museum's venture to explore different possibilities of engaging the public without the presence of a building – planned for completion in late 2017. Mobile M+ hopes to turn the supposed disadvantage of being 'rootless' into an advantage, by realising projects that would not have been possible in a single museum building.
Artists:
Cao Fei, Choi Jeong Hwa, Paul McCarthy, Lukas Tam Wai Ping, Jiakun Studio, Museo Aero Solar
Open: Thursday, 25 April 2013
Close: Sunday, 09 June 2013
Address: West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade, West Kowloon, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Opening hour:
Daily | 6am - 11pm
Transport: Tung Chung Line MTR, Kowloon; Bus KMB 8, 11, 203E, 215X, or 281A and get off at the Austin Road West
Cao Fei joined the selection committee for the curatorship of the 8th Berlin Biennale
2012.10.12
The selection committee for the curatorship of the 8th Berlin Biennale consisted of Sergio Edelsztein (Director and Chief Curator, The Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv); Cao Fei (Artist, Bejing), Susanne Gaensheimer (Director, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt a. M.), Koyo Kouoh (Founding Director and Artistic Director, Raw Material Company - Center for Art, Knowledge and Society, Dakar), Matthias Mühling (Head of Department, Curator, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich), Bisi Silva (Director and Founder, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos), and Patricia Sloane (Associate Curator, MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo and advisor to the Head of Visual Arts, UNAM Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City).
Juan A. Gaitán appointed curator of the 8th Berlin Biennale
Whose Utopia@VOICE OF IMAGES, The Palazzo Grassi-François Pinault Foundation, Venice, Italy
2012.08.30 - 2013.01.13
Cao Fei, Whose Utopia, video installation, 2007. François Pinault foundation's collection.
The Palazzo Grassi-François Pinault Foundation's "Voices of Images" will be the foundation's first exhibition dedicated to the moving image. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, who manages the foundation's collection, the show (Aug. 29, 2012–Jan. 13, 2013) encompasses 30 works of film, video and installation, by 25 artists. The exhibition's opening will coincide with the start of the 69th Venice International Film Festival.
Bourgeois has organized numerous shows for the Pinault Foundation (such as "The World Belongs to You" (2011) and "In Praise of Doubt" (2011/12).
The artist list includes Adel Abdessemed, Peter Aerschmann, Yael Bartana, Mohamed Bourouissa, Mircea Cantor, Paul Chan, Liu Da Hong, Yang Fudong, Cao Fei, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Michel François, Abdulnasser Gharem, Johan Grimonprez, Hassan Khan, Taro Izumi, Cameron Jamie, Zoe Leonard, Bruce Nauman, Shirin Neshat, William Pope.L, Anri Sala, Javier Tellez, Bill Viola and Mark Wallinger.
General information : Palazzo Grassi Campo San Samuele 3231 30124 Venise Vaporetto : San Samuele (ligne 2), Sant’ Angelo (ligne 1)
London Hayward Gallery: Wide Open School. Cao Fei - The Orchid Pavilion
2012.06.03
The Hayward Gallery’s Wide Open School is an unusual experiment in learning. Its programme of classes is devised and delivered by over 100 artists from approximately 40 different countries. It is not an art school however. Instead it is a wide-ranging forum where artists lead and facilitate workshops, collaborative projects, collective discussions, lectures and performances about any and all subjects in which they are passionately interested. That is a territory as expansive as the imaginations of artists.
Cao Fei's project The Orchid Pavilion is based on a cultural gathering/drinking contest that took place during the Six Dynasties era in China: cups of wine were set afloat down a winding creek and poets would have to drink and compose a poem each time a cup stopped near them.
For the class, Cao Fei focuses on the Taoist concept of 'effortless action', which cultivates a state of being in which our actions are aligned with the elemental cycles of the natural world to allow us to respond to situations with ease. Participants are asked to discuss a subject chosen by the artist each time they drink a cup of wine.
Cao Fei leads the discussion with fellow artist Pak Sheung Chuen.
TRACK is a temporary exhibition in the public and semi-public space of the city of Ghent. Philippe Van Cauteren and Mirjam Varadinis invited 35 artists to make an in-depth exploration of six typical neighbourhoods in Ghent and to come up with artistic proposals that interact with the different communities in various ways. The curators took the time to select surprising, meaningful and hidden locations in the wider city centre of Ghent and invited artists who have an affinity with the thematic context of the various places. The selected artists use the local reality as a fertile source of inspiration to reflect upon the city and the contemporary human condition in a global light. The results of their explorations are not simply traditional works of art, but artistic projects with an intense relationship with the city and its inhabitants that will leave permanent traces.
TRACK was initiated by S.M.A.K. It continues the tradition established by the large-scale exhibition projects Chambres d’Amis (1986) and Over the Edges (2000), that had installed contemporary art in the context of the city and entered into a direct dialogue with the public.
Game On / Re-Newing Media Art: A Touring Initiative, Ireland
2012.03.02 – 2012.03.30
Cao Fei, “Live in RMB City,” 2009, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing.
Game On / Re-Newing Media Art is a touring screening programme of artist’s film and video works that utilise the imagery and media of desktop interfaces, video games and online software. Curated by Chris Clarke (Curator of Education and Collections, Lewis Glucksman Gallery). Game On explores the ways in which contemporary artists appropriate and manipulate extant online materials and applications, often in order to challenge the rhetoric of user-interactivity and to highlight the aesthetics of the computer screen.
While new media artists have often explored computer technologies in their practices, the featured artists in Game On appropriate existing software; an approach shared with hackers and ‘hacktivists’ who often re-programme mass-produced video games and applications as a strategy of subversion. While hacking has generally concerned itself with forms of sabotage through computer viruses and website vandalism, the artists here use widely-available software to create films that emphasise the aesthetic qualities of the virtual landscape.
Artists: Peggy Ahwesh (US), Paul B. Davis (US), Michael Bell-Smith (US), CaoFei (CN), Faith Denham (IE), JODI (NL), Oliver Laric (AT), Conor McGarrigle (IE), Takeshi Murata (US)
Cao Fei: Simulus, Surrey Art Gallery, Vancouver Canada
2012.04.07 - 2012.06.10
Cao Fei: Simulus
Incorporating elements of video-game interactivity and cinematic viewing, gallery visitors will experience an uncanny parallel city that has been created through the virtual computing community known as Second Life. China’s dynamic new urban landscapes inform a future threatened by uncertain ecological transformation in Cao Fei’s re-imagined China.
Presented as part of Yellow Signal: New Media from China that takes place across Metro Vancouver in the spring of 2012.
Cao Fei: Simulus
Incorporating elements of video-game interactivity and cinematic viewing, gallery visitors will experience an uncanny parallel city that has been created through the virtual computing community known as Second Life. China’s dynamic new urban landscapes inform a future threatened by uncertain ecological transformation in Cao Fei’s re-imagined China.
Presented as part of Yellow Signal: New Media from China that takes place across Metro Vancouver in the spring of 2012.
http://www.surrey.ca/culture-recreation/1566.aspx
SHOW TIME: Choreography in Contemporary Art, Denmark
2012.01.27 – 2012.03.25
Cao Fei, My Future is Not a Dream 02, 2006. Digital c-print, 120 x 150 cm.*
The exhibition SHOW TIME brings together eight artists that investigate the relationship between the body and its surroundings.
The participating artists—Pablo Bronstein, CaoFei, Jacqueline Doyen, İnci Eviner, Shaun Gladwell, Nina Saunders and Sans façon—lift methodologies and ideas from the worlds of choreography, dance and architecture and use these to explore how the environment affects our movements, habits and gestures. Many of the artists work across the boundaries of specific art forms to combine sculpture, installation, film, performance and dance. Furthermore, the exhibition as a whole seeks to play with the fluidity of time by presenting an array of works that reference multiple times and unfold at varying speeds. Within this remit video works provide a universe of possibilities for the body in motion and enable the audience to traverse multiple sites and times.
SHOW TIME is created specifically for the kunsthal Gl Holtegaard, located in an 18th century country house with a baroque garden. Many of the recurrent themes in the exhibition such as baroque notions of the body in movement and slippages in time are motivated by its unique location, while unlocking the potential of Gl Holtegaard as a site for contemporary art within a historical framework.
Arthouse at the Jones Center: Cao Fei's Shadow Life
2011.08.31 - 2011.10.30
Shadow Life, Cao’s most recent video, is an adaptation of traditional Chinese shadow puppetry. During the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279 CE), performances known as “large shadow shows” featured actors hidden behind the screen instead of puppets. The intricate hand puppets animating Shadow Life merge these traditional art forms to tell a distinctly contemporary story of modern China.
Based on important video artworks from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection, the exhibition Once Upon a Time investigates how contemporary artists adapt motives and narrative techniques from myths, fables, and fairy tales to mirror current social phenomena and events in recent history.... In Whose Utopia (2006) Cao examines the effects of capitalism on individual workers at the OSRAM China Lighting Ltd.
Intellectual Marathon in RMB City, Crystal Ball, De La Warr Pavilion, England
2012.08.11 - 2012.08.12
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill On Sea (England)
Intellectual Marathon in RMB City, Cao Fei, 2012
"Crystal Ball" is a collection of single-channel videos by nine contemporary artists from around the globe commissioned by the IOC Olympics Media Art Collection Premiering at the De La Warr Pavilion. These new works reflect the values of Olympism through the prism of unique international perspectives.
Featured nine new media artists: Kota Ezawa, Cao Fei, Yeondoo Jung, Kimsooja, Torsten Lauschmann, Susan Pui San Lok, Emily Wardill and Hiraki Sawa. The works will be shown in special screenings with exhibition partners at AND Festival in Manchester, De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill and the Third Space Gallery in Belfast.
The New York Observer －Serious Play: Cao Fei at Lombard-Freid
2011.06.21
By Will Heinrich 6/21 7:37pm
In the 19th century, Great Britain used gunboats to address its trade imbalance with China. It must have seemed clear enough who was doing what to whom. But in the 21st century, things are more complicated. The gunboats remain ready, but the more visible weapons—if they are weapons—have so far been children’s television characters. In “Play Time,” her fourth solo show at Lombard-Freid, the Cantonese, Beijing-based artist Cao Fei describes, with two videos, a small installation, and a series of photographs, whats being done. If she doesn’t make clear exactly who’s doing it, she does make clear just how unclear it is.
One video begins with a dump truck driving down a tree-lined avenue, past purple fields. Mounted over the truck’s grill is a huge image of Thomas the Tank Engine, the lead character of an animated program that was adapted for British television from a popular children’s book in the 1980s and has been showing in China since 2008. A gang of women clean and polish the windshield and fenders. When Thomas stops to let his driver ask for directions, children assemble. A small boy stares coolly through black sunglasses; an excited young mother tells her reticent son, “Point at the car and say Thomas.”
Thomas continues on to a construction site, where his driver changes a tire, and a gang of dusty workers fills him up with debris. A brief shot of Thomas’s patient, pensive, frowning face is the linchpin of the video: Thomas may be a cartoon train engine, but he knows what he’s doing.
And yet, he’s still a cartoon train engine, and that’s what makes everything so maddeningly fascinating. Cheery music begins to play as Thomas leaves the construction site and joins thousands of middle-class cars on a Beijing highway. He changes lanes. Other drivers smile. He passes the Bird’s Nest, the beautiful, futuristic stadium designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in consultation with currently-imprisoned Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei. When he stops for gas at a Sinopec station, we glimpse two different pairs of McDonald’s golden arches. More smiling fans. “Who is Thomas always together with?” an excited mother asks her bashful son; a little girl loudly declares, “Thomas isn’t often so upstanding.” The numbers on the pump flash rapidly as Thomas fills up with gas. Workers in matching blue uniforms crowd together for a picture.
On an even prettier tree-lined street, Thomas is stopped by a policeman, who angrily tells Thomas’s driver that trucks aren’t allowed there. “Hurry up and leave,” he says. The driver stops outside a cheap restaurant to lean against the fender with a styrofoam container of rice. A chef comes out to deliver a couple of skewers of meat. Then it’s time to drive again. Thomas’s very big day finally finishes when he arrives at an otherworldly brown landscape, with a mist-obscured stupa in the background, ready to dump his load, sleep a good night’s sleep, and do it all again the next day.
Things move quickly. Ms. Cao was introduced to Thomas the Tank Engine by her first son, who was born in 2009 and is already a fan. The video’s title, East Wind, is also a translation of the brand name of its truck, Dong Feng. Dong Feng was founded in 1969 as part of Mao’s deterrent strategy of building up an industrial base in Western China. “East wind,” said Mao, “prevails over west wind,” but the interesting thing about wind is that it’s not something you can ever quite put your finger on.
All in all, it’s nice to have a job, even if it means being posted abroad. But the plush CBeebies, descendants of the Teletubbies, represent the other side of the equation, having become displaced persons. The fourteen crisp and lovely c-prints of Ms. Cao’s PostGarden series follow them as they wander through the alternately lush and bleak landscapes of modern China. In Back to the Garden, Makka Pakka sprawls in a field of wildflowers with a guitar, while Igglebiggle and Upsy Daisy gaze into the future and the Tombliboos frolic behind. There’s a kind of shock of the real as you approach this photo, so silly and fantastical, and realize that you can make out individual purple blossoms around Makka Pakka’s white legs. In Twilight, Igglebiggle sprawls in the dirt of a misty, refuse-strewn forest, with Upsy Daisy, exhausted, lying across his legs.
The rest of the photos are arranged in pairs for a game of “spot the differences.” In After a Long Day, the CBeebies are wrapped in blankets, squatting under an elevated highway. In the left-hand photo, one of the Tombliboos has a rubber chicken on a stick; in the right-hand photo, he’s only got the stick. In Papa’s Funeral, Tombliboos hold Igglebiggle in a stretcher while Makka Pakka and Upsy Daisy dig a grave. Igglebiggle holds a red handkerchief that might be a flag in one version of the photo; in the other, it’s gone.
Play Time Fingerboard Park Installation is a tabletop wooden construction of denatured architectural signifiers. The “fingerboards,” little toy skateboards, are too big for the ramps, spirals, and ziggurats ostensibly designed for their pleasure. This is as silly as it is cerebral, as ironic as it is literal. It manages to be cheerful without being optimistic. In a way what Ms. Cao is saying is, “What can you say?” But if you live in 2011, you look at all of this, and you know what it means.
Your fingers can shred in Play Time (all works 2011), a sculpture by Cao Fei that shares its title with her fourth solo exhibition at Lombard Fried. Wooden models of monumental architecture—an obelisk, a classical pediment, ziggurats of varying shape—compose a cityscape. But they are obstacles next to the loops and ramps inviting viewers to push miniature skateboards around the sculpture. The video East Wind documents the journey of a truck wearing the face of Thomas the Tank Engine as it travels from a construction site, a zone of imminent future, to a junkyard, the burial grounds of the recent past. It’s shot in the countryside, far from the skyscrapers of Special Economic Zones. A brief video trilogy, Shadow Life, evokes folklore and communist festivals. The vignettes are performed by shadow puppets; the form of the hand is a synecdoche for the manual labor of workers and peasants, while the silhouette medium allows quick metamorphoses of a grandstanding dictator to a barking dog, a swaying tree to a crane transforming the landscape. A remake of a 2000 Russian pop hit serves as the sound track to the third part, Transmigration—a farcical rejoinder to Mao’s cover of Marxism-Leninism.
In her early work, Cao appraised the legacy of her father, a socialist realist sculptor who made images of the perfect society. She later turned to Second Life as a site for realizing the late-capitalist dream of near-instant return on investment. “Play Time” subtly fuses these directions of her work. Cao, unlike Ai Weiwei, does not bluntly say what the West expects to hear about China. Instead, she speaks as a witness to value systems shifting and struggling and ultimately dissolving in a global market that trades mostly in the intangible. From this stance she can show us the similarities between a system promising the attainment of paradise through labor and another where paradise can be purchased. The sweeping social experiments of the twentieth century, receding into history, shrink to toy scale. Ideology of any stripe looks as flimsy—and as vital—as a child’s play.
The Village Voice - Best in Show: Cao Fei at Lombard Freid Projects
2011.06.15
By R.C Baker Wednesday, Jun 15 2011
A figure costumed in blue plush tends a fire under a highway overpass, soft red knobs sprouting from his beach-ball-size head. His companion's rainbow dreads droop over her purple face as she forlornly observes his labors. Amid the concrete pillars, similar creatures slump; nearby, a garbage bag overflows with gathered bottles and cans. Beijing-based Cao Fei's series of beautifully composed photographs transports these cartoonish characters, who normally frolic in the lush groves of the BBC children's show In the Night Garden, to the outskirts of modern China's jaggedly distributed economic miracle. Each tableau is hung with a twin that contains subtle compositional changes, enticing you to look closely, like a child playing "Spot the Difference." But instead of mismatched whiskers on a kitten, Cao pairs troupes of homeless playthings pushing shopping carts laden with refuse.
This theme of adulterated childhood continues in the video East Wind, which follows a dump truck with a facsimile of Thomas the Tank Engine's face bolted to its hood. The rig is loaded with debris and rumbles down crowded highways, eliciting smiles from young and old all the way to the dump. In the background, huge cranes create angled geometries in the sky, a motif echoed in the animation Shadow Life (2011), where the black silhouettes of hands and bent arms dig into an undulating horizon. Cao deftly shifts scale—are these shadowy forms strip-mining paradise, or is this a psychic surgeon dipping into a writhing patient? Fluttering wrists and fingers conjure birds, monkeys, and waving branches, while stiff palms outline bridges and form a bulldozer that flattens everything in its path.
Kids love animated costumes and anthropomorphized machines, and adults are happy to lose themselves in their children's whimsy. Cao's sharp-edged imagery cuts off such escape routes by lashing the candy colors and bulbous contours of the kiddie-industrial complex to narratives that uncover the rot intrinsic to excess.
SOMETIMES the most telling things about a society can be found in the messages it broadcasts to children. That seems to be the gist of a curious 10-minute video on view at Lombard-Freid Projects in Chelsea. In it a Chinese-built truck made to look like Thomas the Tank Engine tootles around Beijing, delighting the children it encounters. But the truck is actually on a more prosaic mission: picking up rubble from one of the city’s many construction sites and unloading it in a dump near the Summer Palace.
It is one of the pieces in “Play Time,” a new show by the Chinese artist Cao Fei that runs through June 25.
Although the BBC’s “Thomas and Friends” has been broadcast since 2008 in China, Ms. Cao said she was blind to it and other children’s shows until the birth of her son, Lim Sun Yun, in 2009. “That is what he watches!” she exclaimed on a Skype call from Beijing, still sounding a bit surprised.
“Daily,” emphasized her husband, the Singaporean conceptualist Lim Tzay Chuen, who sat in as translator for part of the interview.
Ms. Cao, 33, who is expecting another baby in October, added: “My assistants, they don’t know about these characters. But all the children and parents do.”
A veteran of two Venice Biennales, one Carnegie International and countless international fairs and expositions, Ms. Cao is one of mainland China’s hottest art exports, known for videos and conceptual projects that uncover curious subcultures, all while shining a light on contemporary Chinese life. With the 2004 video “Cosplayers,” she honed in on China’s early “cosplay” scene, following kids costumed like Japanese anime characters as they staged fantastical battles, then returned to humdrum home lives. For “Whose Utopia” (2006-7) she persuaded workers in a Guangdong Province light-bulb factory to enact their fantasies and filmed them as rock musicians, break dancers and ballerinas on the factory floor.
In 2007 Ms. Cao began delving into the online world Second Life, where she eventually built her own island metropolis, “RMB City,” which opened in 2009. Named for the renminbi, China’s currency, its exuberant landscape — a mash-up of real and invented landmarks — seemed to echo the country’s rampant real-estate development. Together with her avatar, China Tracy, Ms. Cao created videos, games and performances there, exploring the interplay between real and virtual life. “For me it was like an artist’s residency in the virtual world,” she said.
And now Ms. Cao has zeroed in on yet another subculture: the world of childhood, as viewed through its entertainments, moral messages and toys.
Besides as the Thomas piece “Play Time” includes a video featuring some incredibly skillful shadow puppets, and a series of photographs based on another popular BBC export, “In the Night Garden,” a surreal adventure show for preschoolers that takes over where the Teletubbies left off. There is also a skate park for fingerboards (miniature skateboards controlled by the fingers), whose architecture is somewhat reminiscent of “RMB City.”
The show seems to be a transitional one for Ms. Cao, who plans to shut down “RMB City” this summer. But it has her trademark sensibility: pop and playful on the surface, complex social portrait beneath.
Take the Thomas video, named “East Wind,” after Mao’s 1957 declaration that “the east wind is prevailing over the west wind,” which presaged China’s first wave of nationalist industrial development. But the specter of a Chinese-made truck merrily disguised as a British import (especially considering that many Western toys are made in China) suggests that East and West are now inextricably intertwined.
By contrast, the shadow puppet video, inspired by a long-ago state broadcast of a Chinese Spring Festival Gala, seems an ironic nod to the entertainments of Ms. Cao’s own childhood during the early days of China’s economic reform. It features a Mao-like dictator who crushes the hands that applaud him, after which the countryside is obliterated by backhoes and derricks, leaving peasants and animals wandering among skyscrapers to the sound of upbeat music.
Ms. Cao said her initial inspiration for the show was the 1967 movie “Playtime” by Jacques Tati, the French filmmaker, a meditation on midcentury urban life filmed in Tativille, a vast set filled with modernist skyscrapers that he erected outside Paris. “Tati created a D.I.Y. world by himself,” Ms. Cao observed. “I liked the fact that he could manipulate that world and use it to critique modern society.”
She also had “Playtime” in mind while creating “RMB City,” she said. “ ‘Playtime’ for me means like the theater, a play,” she added, “and also playing with society, playing with the work.
For Ms. Cao play and art making have always been intertwined. Born in 1978 in Guangzhou, just as China was opening to the West, she grew up amusing herself in the studio of her father, the realist sculptor Cao Chong’en. (As Ms. Cao pointed out, his work, like her own, “documents society.” Early on, he sculpted Mao and other party leaders but is now best known for a 2005 statue of Bruce Lee on the Avenue of Stars in Hong Kong.)
She was raised in one of China’s first special economic zones, the site of its earliest experiments with capitalism. At 13 she began acting in television commercials directed by her older sister, and she later worked as an art director in the same industry. “All my experience did not come from art school,” she said. “It’s from growing up in the early 1990s in the south of China.”
Her first brush with directing came in high school, when she mounted a wacky 10-minute skit about “a couple who kill people on their way to get money,” she said, creating a huge student hit. After her sister noted its resemblance to the 1994 film “Natural Born Killers,” Ms. Cao began watching movies that went beyond standard Hollywood fare. “At the end of the last century,” she said, “a lot of foreign art films came to China as pirated VCDs. So when people ask me how I learn the camera, I think it’s from those kinds of films.”
She made her first film in 1999. Called “Imbalance 257,” it showcased the subversive ways that her fellow students passed their time: watching pornography; playing practical jokes; taking drugs; practicing Qi Gong, a traditional spiritual practice based on breathing exercises. Her teacher sent a copy to the independent curator Hou Hanru, now director of exhibitions and public programs for the San Francisco Art Institute. Although it had been made with a home camera, “the shooting was amazing, with these long tracking shots and crazily fantastic angles,” Mr. Hou said. Bowled over by Ms. Cao’s “capacity to deal with film language and also her understanding of Chinese youth culture,” he included the piece in PhotoEspaña 2000, an annual photography festival in Madrid, and the Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival in South Korea (now the Busan Biennial).
By the time Ms. Cao finished art school in 2001 she had a career in Europe and Asia. American interest soon followed, and Ms. Cao made the most of it.
“From the beginning she was very organized, with a team around her,” said Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center for Photography. “She was ready to go at an international level much, much earlier than many other Chinese artists.” He introduced Ms. Cao to New York in “Between Past and Future,” a 2004 show of Chinese photography and video that took place at the center and the Asia Society. Later, for the 2009 ICP Triennial, Ms. Cao created a new Second Life avatar for visitors to play with.
“The more knowledgeable young visitors immediately hijacked the avatar and took her to horrific sex clubs,” Mr. Phillips said, noting that he had checked the exhibition regularly to make sure the creature wasn’t engaged in anything too lurid. “That really made me see that she’s communicating very directly with a shockingly young audience, picking up what they’re thinking, and incorporating that into her work.”
As for Ms. Cao, she seems bent on tuning her observations to an even younger audience. “I think not too many parents pay attention to kids’ films and stories,” she said. “But when I see them, I think critically. I have trained eyes.”
Cao Fei: Apocalypse Tomorrow, Vitamin Creative Space at Art Basel 42
2011.06.15 - 2011.06.19
Cao Fei: Apocalypse Tomorrow (2011)
Our avatar is styled after a meditating monk, his heart at ease, his board light, seemingly in mid-flight; he is constantly overcoming every sort of obstacle on the water, but never reaching anything resembling a final destination. This perhaps is the essence of games. Similar to certain phenomena in life, throughout constant elevation of the soul through transmigration, we complete a journey of self-cultivation.
Booth: H8
Venue: Halls 1 and 2 of Messe Basel, Messeplatz, 4005 Basel, Switzerland.
Preview&Vernissage: Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 11am until 9pm
General Public: Wednesday, June 15, to Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11 am until 7 pm Daily
Real Virtuality, Museum of the Moving Image, New York
2011.01.15 - 2011.06.12
CaoFei explores the discrepancies between dream and reality in today’s hyper-capitalist China, exemplifying elements of discontent and disillusionment found in China’s younger generations.
RMB City was launched in late 2008 as a laboratory for experiments in creative arts, architecture, politics, and economics. It has since been augmented by artistic projects made within it, including a series of videos, an opera, and, to mark the culmination of the project, a video game. Acknowledging China’s recent history, RMB City’s architecture references ancient and modern Chinese icons, from the panda to the Beijing National Stadium constructed for the 2008 Olympics. CaoFei has a Second Life avatar, China Tracy, who acts as a guide, philosopher, and tourist.
RMB City, 2008-11
Second Life software has been adapted to allow Museum visitors to explore RMB City using a 3-D mouse.
Surf RMB City
World premiere
Visitors can surf through a version of RMB City that has been submerged in water.
Customized interface developed by Friedrich Kirschner and Hannah Perner-Wilson
Cao Fei, one of the finalists announced on New York Times
2009.10.09
“Cosplayers” (2004), an 8min video by Cao Fei, one of the six artists who are finalists for the 2010 Hugo Boss Prize. Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou/Beijing, and Lombard-Freid Project, New York
“Finalists Announced for 2010 Hugo Boss Prize”
By CAROL VOGEL. Published: October 8, 2009, New York Times
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has chosen the six finalists for its 2010 Hugo Boss Prize. The $100,000 award, given every two years and named for the German men’s wear company that sponsors it, goes to an individual who has made an important contribution to contemporary art.
Unlike many art prizes, this one has no restrictions on age or nationality, so the finalists are often a mix of international figures, and that is true this year. “That there are artists from the Middle East and Asia reflects how we continue to learn more and more about art around the world,” said Nancy Spector, chief curator of the foundation and chairwoman of the six-person jury that will select the winner.
This year’s list, which was announced on Thursday evening, is an eclectic one that leans heavily toward conceptual and performance artists. It includes no painters. These are the finalists:
Cao Fei, 31, a Beijing artist whose work has been shown in many biennials. Ms. Fei explores the rapid evolution of Chinese society and cultural trends in her photographs, videos and new-media work.
Hans-Peter Feldmann, 68, a German artist living in Düsseldorf who appropriates everyday images for his carefully conceived installations. At a show at the International Center of Photography last year, he filled a room with the framed front pages of 100 newspapers — from Paris, Dubai, Sydney, Seoul, New York and elsewhere — printed on Sept. 12, 2001.
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, a conceptual artist in Berlin. (She refuses to give her age.) Her works have included video, performance, computer and sound pieces. A recent one, “Cut,” involved projections of moving razor blades that seemed to be slicing the gallery walls.
Roman Ondak, 43, a Slovakian artist who lives and works in the capital, Bratislava, where he stages performances and installations. His work in his country’s pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale involved an indoor environment that reproduced the greenery, bushes, paths and trees between other exhibition pavilions. Mr. Ondak also created “Measuring the Universe,” at the Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition that closed last month, in which visitors’ heights, first names and the date of the measurement were recorded on the gallery walls.
Walid Raad, 42, a Lebanese conceptual artist who lives and works in Beirut and New York. Last year, in a multimedia project at the International Center of Photography, he depicted the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s in graphic detail, through the voices of people who never existed, using details he invented. He has also created a video purporting to show sunsets supposedly recorded by a Lebanese surveillance-camera operator.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 39, a Thai filmmaker who takes politics and relationships as his subjects. His work was shown at the 2008 Carnegie International, where he won the inaugural Fine Prize for outstanding emerging artist.
The Hugo Boss Prize winner will be announced in the fall of 2010 and will also receive a solo show in 2011 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Hugo Boss Prize -- From Wikipedia:
The Hugo Boss Prize is awarded every other year to an artist (or group of artists) working in any medium, anywhere in the world. The prize is administered by the Guggenheim Museum and sponsored by the Hugo Boss clothing company. It carries with it a cash award of US$100,000 and a tetrahedral trophy. A jury of curators, critics and scholars is responsible for the selection of the artists. They nominate six or seven artists for the short list; several months later, they choose the winner of the prize. In 1996 and 1998, the nominated artists exhibited their work at the now-defunct Guggenheim Soho; since 2000, only the winning artist has shown his or her work.
