The work of Chinese artist Cao Fei explores our brave new human condition in a technological world
- Written by Shuxia Chen, Lecturer, School of Art & Design, UNSW Sydney
Internationally acclaimed Chinese artist Cao Fei’s first retrospective in Australia, My City is Yours at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, sets out to disorient and overstimulate the senses.
In the exhibition introduction, Cao describes “a show that’s boisterous like the mall or the market”. It bombards you with documentaries and sci-fi films, virtual reality (VR) games and vintage arcade machines, neon lights contrasting industrial metal scaffolds, electronica jamming hip-hop music.
Yet, this city-scape of an exhibition has been designed with care. You could take these all in: sitting in a vintage cinema chair by some beach sand, perhaps submerged in sponge blocks; lounging on a sofa in a family living room; hunching on a bunk bed in a factory; resting on the vinyl padded chrome chair of a Cantonese yum-cha restaurant.
Cao embraces this mix of pleasure, convenience, banality, challenge and alienation condensed into the nostalgic, dazzling yet future-craving contemporary life.
Retro-perspective
The entrance of the show replicates the reception of the now demolished Hongxia Theatre in Beijing, built in 1957 for workers employed to build China’s first computers, with the aid of the Soviet Union.
The gilt Chinese inscriptions on the scarlet signboard — “Splendid Galaxy” and “Human World Motion Pictures” — set the retro-futuristic tone that permeates the exhibition.
Through the doors, the gallery space transforms into offices and a cinema furnished with Hongxia Theatre’s chairs, desks and chandeliers. Behind a curtain of a retro wardrobe flashes portraits of current residents.
Cao rented the theatre as a studio between 2015 and 2021. Her time roaming the once cultural hotspot for China’s early techno-optimists results in installations, two documentaries and a sci-fi film, as well as VR work. Through this range of media, the ambitious project connects past and future, as the exhibition section title, Enter the Wormhole, suggests.
The documentary Postscript of Hongxia (2023) captures the memories and fights of the residents and the buildings being brutally bulldozed. Another video work, An Elegy to Hongxia (2023), plays the overly optimistic folk music The Morning Sun at Eight and Nine O’clock (composed by Chinese contemporary indie musician Xiongxiong Homework). The music takes its title from a famous quote by Chairman Mao stressing young people’s vigour, yet the accordion player performs this elegy amid the ruins of the cinema, farewelling a lost socialist dream.
Installation view of the ‘Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 30 November 2024 – 13 April 2025, artworks © Cao Fei. Courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers,
Photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio
This lost dream and accordion music rebirth in Cao’s 2019 sci-fi film NOVA. In this imagined town Nova, a Chinese computer scientist and a Soviet expert fall in love, dancing to Soviet folk and propaganda music, Katyusha. But this collective dream ends again in tragedy. Their love child dissolves into a digital soul trapped in a virtual realm.
He is trekking China’s past, present and future socialisms, perhaps forever.
Factory disco and Canto-humour
Moving toward the Factory Zone, the doubt on techno progression in NOVA is replaced by a disco frenzy in the film Asia One (2018).
This story sets in the world’s first fully automated storage and distribution centre in Kunshan, outskirt of Shanghai. Workers dressed in Maoist period style dance in the empty gigantic warehouse.
A red banner in yellow Chinese characters reads “Humans and machines, hand in hand creating miracles”. The rebellious spirit and optimism in Asia One on one hand evoke connection to China’s recent revolution, on another hand suggest some hope of a future collaborating with machines.
Cao Fei ‘Asia one’ 2018, single-channel HD video, colour, sound, 63:21 min, 2.35:1.
© Cao Fei. Courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers
This retro fantasy could be Cao’s iconic Canto-humour, influenced by 1990s Hong Kong films such as Stephen Chow’s mo lei tau (nonsense) comedies.
Such films were once screened in the Harbour City Cinema, in Sydney’s Chinatown, and Cao has selected movie posters to exhibit alongside the Hongxia project.
The same kind of absurdist Cantonese humour can be found in her earliest DV video work Imbalance 257 (1999). Youngsters from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts act out scenes in the studio, toilet, dormitory and video game arcade.
This is the work that caught the attention of the art world, bringing Cao to a global audience two decades ago.
Installation view of the ‘Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 30 November 2024 – 13 April 2025, artworks © Cao Fei. Courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers,
Photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio
This video work, together with other early DV videos like Rabid Dog (2002) and San Yuan Li (2003, with Ou Ning) are played on retro CRT TVs. You could watch these DVs on the tables surrounding dim-sum trolleys salvaged from the old Haymarket Marigold restaurant.
Installation view of the ‘Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 30 November 2024 – 13 April 2025, artworks © Cao Fei. Courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers,
Photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio
Chinatown hip hop shuffle
Sydney’s Asian-Australian community is celebrated in the newly commissioned work, Hip Hop: Sydney. It is part of Cao’s ongoing series featuring amateur locals dancing on the streets of Guangzhou, New York, Fukuoka and now Sydney.
For this iteration, cosplayers dance in dress-up photo booths; tour guides dance in front of the Haymarket Chinatown ceremonial archway; 90-year-old George Wing Kee dances in front of the Sydney sensation Emperor’s Garden Cakes & Bakery; shoppers dance between aisles of Asian food in Market City’s Thai Kee supermarket; writer and broadcaster Benjamin Law cameos as a waiter. He dances in front of the famous Chinatown Chinese Noodle Restaurant while its boss, Xiaotang Qin, plays Jingle Bells on his violin.
Cao Fei ‘Hip hop: Sydney’ 2024, three-channel HD video, colour, sound, 4:47 min, 48:9, commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
© Cao Fei. Courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers
Exiting the exhibition with this seasonal number still ringing in your ears, you walk fittingly into the gift shop. It appropriately decks out in an assortment of Chinese-cyber-sci-fi-inspired gifts, seemingly mirroring the boisterous market.
Yet, beyond the alluring frantic façade, Cao grapples with questions of techno-optimism, social and urban transformation, virtual identities and their commidifcation.
In other words, this is an exhibition about this brave new human condition we are each coming to terms with.
Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆 is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until April 13 2025.
Authors: Shuxia Chen, Lecturer, School of Art & Design, UNSW Sydney
