Art Exhibition Spotlight: Cao Fei @ Sprüth Magers, LA

Cao Fei (October 8–December 22, 2021 Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles)

Cao Fei’s two most recent feature-length films, Nova (2019) and Asia One (2018), are represented both on screen and through suites of photographs, and each explores this shifting era in different ways. 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 traveling between the past, present and future.” In Asia One, however, we are rooted in a near- future (incidentally this very year, 2021) in which two workers and a robot are left alone in an enormous automated logistics center. Their labor is repetitive and lonely, but through playful fantasies and emotional connection, human and AI consciousness begin to merge.

Also on view are two earlier projects that exhibit this same sense of beauty and melancholy, always punctuated by moments of humor, which have come to characterize Cao Fei’s luminous films. La Town (2014), with its French-language voiceover and intensive pacing, recalls Alain Resnais’ filmic masterpiece Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), albeit rendered through scene after scene of miniatures reeling after a massive, mysterious catastrophe—though many simply carry on with their daily lives. A sense of existential dread pervades the film, and one that could be found in any twenty-first century locale.Haze and Fog (2013) also plays with cinematic genres, this time the western zombie film with hints of Jean-Luc Godard’s camerawork and vignettes depicting different scenes of work and family life in China. Cao Fei created this work in response to the economic crisis of 2008 in an effort to describe the feeling of entrapment, both internal and external, within a perpetual socioeconomic fog.

Finally, the exhibition includes sculptures from Cao Fei’s Rumba series, which recast the popular Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners as actors moving across pedestals. Because of the machines’ internal mechanisms, they stop short of the pedestal edges and continue their electronic dance as if performing on a stage. These works also relate to a film by Cao Fei in which the vacuums move absurdly through urban spaces. This element of repetitive performance, of choreographed movements, and of attempting to break the bounds of one’s current reality, pervades all of Cao Fei’s projects to form a body of work that mines the depths of twenty-first century global life.

The exhibition is presented as an immersive installation, with the visual vocabulary and setting of Cao Fei’s films extending into the exhibition space. On the ground floor, elements featured in Asia One create the backdrop for the screening, such as green plastic flooring, red beam chairs, a yellow grid fence and wallpaper from a film sequence. On the second floor, the viewer is transported into the scenery of Nova set in the disused Hongxia Theatre in Beijing—a mid-twentieth-century cinema decorated in the style of the Sino-Soviet alliance, as well as the artist’s former studio space.

Background

Contemporary art, multimedia installations, photography, and much, much more. Cao Fei is a world-famous Chinese artist who explores alienation and escapism felt by displaced youth through the interplay between virtual and real worlds, utopia and dystopia, and the body and technology. Take a look inside the work of Cao Fei as we walk through her background, mediums and themes, and exhibitions.

Cao Fei was born in 1978 in Guangzhou, China. She later earned her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2001. From there, she began focusing her work on the fluidity of mixed cultures. She began working in film with her first work in 1999, Imbalance 257, which explored how disenfranchised youth were rejecting Chinese traditions.

From there, she worked with Surrealist methods to communicate social issues such as the presence of evil in daily life or male erotic egocentricity. She was active with this style in 2003 and 2004 before transitioning to projects working with disillusioned youth. 

By this time, Cao Fei was focusing on pop culture, technology, and the virtual world and how youth use it as a means of escape. She featured works about Cosplayers in 2004 and virtual living in 2008 with her imaginary city in the game Second Life. She has continued her work through the years pulling from the same themes and inspirations. In general, she focuses her work on themes of allegory, avatars and alter egos, digital landscape, history, and world-building. Her choices of medium are generally focused on animation, digital media, installation, performance, photography, and video.

In 2006, she received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award Best Young Artist Award. Later, in 2010 she was a nominee for the Future Generation Art Prize and a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize. More recently, in 2016 she won the Best Artist Award from the Chinese Contemporary Art Award.

Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions:

• Nova (2019) 

• Asia One, New York (2018)

• MoMA PS1, New York (2016)

• Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2016)

• Splendid River (2015)

• Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2014)

• Haze and Fog (2013)

• Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2009)

• Serpentine Gallery, London (2008)

• Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2007)

• Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands (2006)

• Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2006)

Group Exhibitions:

• Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2018)

• Guggenheim Museum (2017)

• Bentu: Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation, Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2016)

• On the Shoulders of Giants, Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany (2016)

• Breaking Forecast: 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2009)

• New Museum Triennial (2009)

• Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008)

• Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008)

• Yokohama Triennial (2008)

• Brave New Worlds, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007)

• Biennials of Istanbul, Lyon, and Venice (2007)

• Follow Me!: Chinese Contemporary Art at the Threshold of the Millennium, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2005)

• Die Chinesen: Fotografie und Video aus China, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2004)

Institutional Exhibitions:

• 56th Venice Biennale (2014)

• New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2008)

• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007)

• Sydney Biennial (2006 and 2010)

• P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City (2006)

• Asia Society, New York (2006)