Cao Fei

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.

Model figures and plastic buildings in an imagined post-apocalyptic metropolis.

People dressed up as dogs make weird things.

In Cao Fei’s most recent video work, East Wind (2011), a dinky blue Chinese truck with the face of Thomas the Tank Engine beetles around the streets of a Chinese city to the theme tune of the BBC program. The truck stops for petrol, attracting a crowd of delighted fans. It collects rubbish from a demolition site and then merrily takes this to a dump on the outskirts of town (the driver stopping for a pee by the side of the road on the way). With a sense of joyful conquest, the bright smiling face of Thomas charges through the changing Chinese landscape, announcing the triumph of simplicity at every turn.

Darkly humorous reinterpretation of the zombie film, set in Beijing. Here the undead are real estate agents, nouveau riche businessmen, security guards, manicurists, and sex workers seeking contact in an increasingly individualized, alienating society.

The two protagonists – an architect and a prisoner living in parallel realities in the present time and an ambiguous distanced past, respectively – conjure up imaginations and experiences of imprisonment. In their dialogue across space and time they debate the relations between humans, the world, and freedom. They talk of visible and invisible imprisonment, existentialism as a means of self-redemption, and at the same time question the relationship of humans to the space around them. An attempt at reconciliation with the world and human nature.

RMB City Opera is an experimental theatrical play inspired by the ‘Eight Model Works’, a propaganda opera from the Chinese Cultural Revolution. On the borderline between past and future, between classic and contemporary realities, the performance explores the connections between real and virtual identities, using both physical and virtual spaces as a stage for interaction between actors and avatars.

In 2021, a young female worker, a male worker and a cute AI robot are working in a large automated logistics centre “Asia One Unmanned Warehouse”. After long periods of loneliness and repetitious labour in the factory, the young workers start to have a special feeling for each other. In a humdrum day-to-day work-life, they seem to have fallen in an emotional entanglement between the ‘unmanned’ (intelligentised production), “human” and “non-human” (robot).

Short documentary about people involved in Cosplay.

Swiss collector Uli Sigg has played in the time of economic opening of China by Mao an essential role, which is still continuing. To better understand China, in 1980 as an entrepreneur and business expert to the country called Sigg art turns to and wears for years the most important collection of contemporary Chinese art together. THE CHINESE LIVES OF ULI SIGG granted for the first time a comprehensive insight into the exciting and extraordinary life of the entrepreneur, diplomat and art collector. Contemporary artists like Ai Weiwei, Zeng Fanzhi, Cao Fei, Fang Lijun Wang Guangyi or consider him a friend and mentor to whom they could entrust their works, to protect them against the arbitrary destruction of the authorities. The majority of them are over the Sigg museum M + in Hong Kong, which expected to open in 2019 and the works will be presented to the general public.

A three-part film by Cao Fei. Part one, 'Imagination of Product', shows workers and machines at the OSRAM lightbulb factory in China's Pearl River Delta. In the second part, 'Factory Fairytale', dancers and musicians appear in the factory, as work continues around them. Finally, 'My Future is Not a Dream' consists of portraits of the factory workers facing Fei's camera.

The urban fringe of Beijing is the loosen bricks from fragmented land. A result of urban development. The dynamic and complex urban system produced and blurred out the edges between cities and suburbs. The size, scale and land use of different areas are at constant conversion to each other, which becomes the foundation to China urban development and relative space of the society and the economy. In the video, several domestic vacuum cleaning robots are released at urban fringe. The robots navigate randomly in a demolishing area - a scene that we already witness and it could be found in different area under urbanization; a scene that is exciting and also being the norm in China. The robots - as the visitors from the outer space, arrive in our world. By taking in the dust and ashes at the urban fringe, the land reality is collected and made into a sample; a sample that conveys our all time obsession and celebration of modern contemporary.

San Yuan Li, the collaborative project by Ou Ning, Cao Fei, and the members of U-thèque Organization, is a case study of the typical “urban village” phenomenon of Guangzhou in 1990s. Armed with video cameras, the crew penetrated San Yuan Li as “city flâneurs,” presented a highly stylized portrait of the village, attempting to rethink the debt of history, to document the confrontation and reconciliation between the newly urbanization and the patriarchal-clan-based traditional community, as well as the weird architectures and cultural landscape emerging from this previously rural area. At the end, all the colored footages were eidted into a piece of black-and-white video poetry. The project was exhibited in the 50th Venice Biennale for the first time, and then screened worldwide.

Once the site of China's early tech industry, Jiuxiangiao is now a 'shanty area' slated for urban renewal. Residents recall how the area grew into an advanced electronics district in the 1950s, as part of the Chinese government's first Five-Year Plan for social and economic development. With support from the Soviet Union, factories began producing China's first home grown large scale computers and telephone switchboards. The Hongxia was built as part of a network of amenities including a ballroom and gaming arcade, all intended to enrich the cultural lives of workers. There were onsite nurseries at factories, free swimming pools and the cinema, where entry was free or five cents at most. As interviewees mourn the loss of these services, developers are knocking. 'To tear this place down and build skyscrapers - it makes my heart ache!' laments Wei Guotian, the theatre's former manager.

Thank you, take a look at me, give you, a kiss …… to you, a kiss ……

Cao Fei explores a virtual metropolis within the online platform Second Life. The work blends real and fictional elements of Chinese identity and urbanism to comment on capitalism and development in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Marxist iconography intersects with modern corporate structures, creating a dystopian yet whimsical reflection on 21st-century economic realities.

Nova follows the story of a computer scientist engaged in a secretive international project; as part of his experiments he uses his son, who is accidentally turned into a digital version of himself and trapped in an eternal cyberspace. At once a period piece and a sci-fi film, Nova's narrative slowly devolves, and in the words of the artist, "The film has no sense of time, because the actors are always travelling between the past, present, and future."

Burners is discussing the autonomy of desire and conversations between desires. It is an expression of a certain extremely private viewpoint. It reveals the existence of privacy in soft porn and mocks at the idea of male egocentricity; it is in sympathy with the autonomy of desire and fantasizes about revolution and liberty (not only those related to sex). The video is definitely neither a cry of a defender of feminism nor a female artist's opinion on sex. It not only depicts sex, but also talks about love and choices, the mental ones rather than the physical ones.

In Milkman which was made in 2005, Cao Fei sorrowfully captures the daily life of the nominal main character who is a milkman. He is sprawled all over his bed during the day and agonizes over the temptation of an online sex chatting show. By capturing the moment the character’s simple life and his stimulating online fantasy meet, the artist shows another side to her world of art in the virtual reality in which she has continuously showed interest.

Cao Fei recorded her experiences within the online social platform Second Life. The result is a wistful, surreal vision of an alternative reality sprung from the pop culture fantasies and hyper-consumerism of contemporary urban China, while also trying to transcend its real-life limitations. It can be seen as an answer to the challenge posed by River Elegy: how to envision a new Chinese destiny founded on principles of individuality, creativity, discovery, and freedom. The film also reflects the contemporary condition of the virtual supplanting our experience of the real.