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.
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National Gallery Singapore - Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commission
17.01 - 31.12.2020This 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. -
Power 100 by ArtReview 2019
16.11.2019“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
more info:
Power 100 ArtReview 2019 -
[AR]T Walks. Experience Augmented Reality at Apple
10.08.2019Trade 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.
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Center Pompidou Solo Exhibition - Cao Fei: HX
05.06.2019 - 26.08.2019This 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 theCentre Pompidou. Venue: Galerie 4 - Centre Pompidou, Paris.
More info
Press release click here
Centre Pompidou website -
Shining a Light on Chinese Workers, NY Times
08.03.2019The 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.Full article on New York Times Website -
Upcoming screening: Prison Architect at Forum Expanded, 69TH BERLINALE
06.02.2019 - 10.03.2019Cao Fei, Prison Architect, 2018. Commissioned by Tai Kwun ContemporaryPrison 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.
Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary
Prison Architect showing dates during Berlinale:
2019-02-08 20:00 Werkstattkino@silent green
2019-02-12 15:00 Arsenal 1
Actors: Valerie Chow, Kwan Sheung ChiCinematographer: Kwan Pun Leung -
Power 100 by ArtReview 2018
09.11.2018New Entry: Cao FeiFull article on ArtReview website -
Upcoming exhibition: A hollow in a world too full at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong
08.09 - 09.12.2018Cao 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.
Presented by UCCA
Address: 10 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong
More info: Tai Kwun Website
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An Artist Warns of a Robot-Ruled Future. Or Is It Our Present? Let’s Discuss, NY Times
23.08.2018David 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.Full Article on the New York Times website -
EXTREME. NOMADS. Artist Talks / Panels
24.05.2018Yuk Hui, Cao Fei and Peter Gorschlüter. Thursday, May 24, 11:30am (CET) at MMK 3EXTREME. NOMADS. Artist Talks / PanelsThursday, May 24, 11:30am (CET)
Yuk Hui, Cao Fei and Peter GorschlüterVenue: MMK 3, Domstraße 3, 60311 Frankfurt am MainExhibition 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.Exhibition details: MMK