CAO FEI

Born 1978 in Guangzhou, China. Lives and works in Beijing, China.

Cao Fei, Untitled (People's Limbo), 2009, Second Life. Courtesy of RMB City © 2009. RMB City Project is developed by Cao Fei (SL: China Tracy) and Vitamin Creative Space. Facilitator: Uli Sigg (SL: UliSigg Cisse)

Cao Fei is a young photographer and new media artist from the Pearl River Delta in southern China who grew up in a media-saturated environment absorbing a host of new entertainment sources – from early MTV to consumer advertising to Japanese anime. Unlike many of the previous generation of Chinese artists who chose to live and work abroad, Cao Fei and her peers have remained active in China, taking advantage of its rapidly developing technological economies as well as new practical possibilities for artmaking.

Cao Fei has developed a broad range of work across photography, performance, installation, film and even online projects. She has forged a range of cutting-edge interdisciplinary and often collaborative projects that document and negotiate the new social realities of daily life. By using the experience of daily life in the city of Guangzhou as source material for her work, she has worked with policemen, old people and teenagers, tapping into their fantasies and self-images through popular contemporary culture. Her video Hip Hop (2003) shows construction workers and everyday people dancing to western hip-hop, while her video and photographic piece COSPlayers (2004) takes as its subject the cult of anime ‘costume play’, in which young people dress up to inhabit the fantasy role of their favourite characters. Cao Fei captures their ‘magical’ powers played out in nondescript post-industrial spaces.

Although rooted in daily life, Cao Fei’s work evokes countless possibilities for social transformation in what is one of the most pressured of Chinese urban environments. For a number of years she has been working on a large chaotic project called RMB City (in reference to the Chinese unit of currency) that exists in installations and online in Second Life. The animated video shown in the 17th Biennale of Sydney is part of this, showing a confrontation between the ideologies of Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Lao Tsu and Lehman Brothers, the now defunct financial services firm, in which the parties discuss money, power and ideology. In this concise and humorous work, Cao Fei captures the sceptical perspective of her generation in relation to such weighty topics heightened by a period of world economic crisis and unsure ideological development

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘RMB City Opera’, Teatro Astra, Artissima Art Fair, Torino, Italy
2009 ‘Live in RMB City’, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2008 ‘RMB City’, Lombard-Freid Projects, New York, USA
2008 ‘RMB City’, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK
2006 ‘PRD Anti-Heroes’, Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands

Selected Group Exhibitions

2010 ‘Contemplating the Void’, Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
2009 ‘Dress Codes’, The Third IC P Triennial of Photography and Video, New York, USA
2009 ‘Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation’, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, China
2008 ‘Life on Mars’, 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA
2008 ‘Time Crevasse’, 3rd Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan

Selected Bibliography

Holland Cotter, ‘Young Artists, Caught in the Act’, New York Times, 9 April 2009
Brian Droitcour, ‘Virtual Reality’, Artforum.com, January 2006
Nicola Harvey, ‘Cao Fei: History and the Future; East and West; community and isolation’, Frieze, issue 127, November–December 2009, p. 119
Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ‘Cao Fei’, Artforum, vol. XLIV , no. 5, January 2006, p. 181
Benjamin Thorel, ‘Cao Fei: The Adventure of the Self ’, Art Press, no. 343, March 2008, pp. 40–43