曹斐 Cao Fei

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.

more info: Lombard Freid Gallery
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.

more info: Adelaide Festival Centre
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
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–5:30pm
T +86 755 2691 5100/02
info@ocat.org.cn
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

Whose Utopia, video, 2006, Cao Fei

The Utopia of monetary power

is gradually replacing

the Utopia of social good.

Is Utopia for sale?

more info: www.fondazionemaxxi.it
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.

Haze and Fog - Trailer: www.youtube.com

More info: www.chinese-arts-centre.org
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.

More: 9bienalmercosul.art.br
Cao Fei: Haze and Fog, Tate Modern, London, UK
22.09.2013

Cao Fei, Haze and Fog 2013

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

More: www.tate.org.uk
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.

21 September – 16 November 2013

Preview Friday 20 September, 6–8pm

Eastside Projects

86 Heath Mill Lane

Birmingham B9 4AR

+44 (0)121 771 1778

More info: eastsideprojects.org
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.

More: exhibition photos pinchukartcentre.org
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.

— Tarek Abou El Fetouh

More info:

www.e-flux.com

www.ashkalalwan.org