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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.
more info: http://www.observer.com/2011/06/serious-play-cao-fei-at-lombard-freid/
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New York Critics' Picks: Cao Fei, ARTFORUM
2011.06.18
Text: Brian Droitcour
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.
http://artforum.com/picks/section=nyc#picks28474
p.s. ARTFORUM "Critics' Picks" section, a select reviews of shows worldwide.
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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.
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Chinese Life as Child’s Play, New York Times
2011.06.03
Photo: Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
New York Times - Art and Design: Chinese Life as Child’s Play
By CAROL KINO
Published: June 2, 2011
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.”
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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: H8Venue: Halls 1 and 2 of Messe Basel, Messeplatz, 4005 Basel, Switzerland.Preview&Vernissage: Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 11am until 9pmGeneral Public: Wednesday, June 15, to Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11 am until 7 pm Daily
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Real Virtuality, Museum of the Moving Image, New York
2011.01.15 - 2011.06.12
Cao Fei 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. Cao Fei 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
more info:http://www.movingimage.us/exhibitions/2011/01/15/detail/real-virtuality/
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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.