Cao Fei is a video artist, best known for her recent project on Second Life, which stars her avatar, China Tracy. Born in 1978, Cao lives and works in Beijing.
Cao Fei was born in 1978 in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province.
Childhood & Family
Cao Fei was born in Guangzhou and grew up in a family that had two other artists: her older sister and her father, a State sculptor. Her parents worked at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art and its affiliated middle school. And so art seem a natural path for her too. According to the critic Hou Hanru, Cao Fei's childhood was filled with music videos, pop music and television shows from Hong Kong. VCDs and DVDS introduced her to film makers like Pedro Almodovar. As she says in an interview with Wei Ying and Lynn Zhang for ArtzineChina, her earliest ideas were to explore the relationship between art and reality, and art and religion.[1]
Education & Development
In middle school, she participated in theatre and shot experimental short films on campus. Her earliest work was about campus life, filled with the spirit of rebellion, and yet, as ArtZineChina explains, those rebels had little direction. Later, Cao attended the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, where she graduated in 2000 with a bachelor's degree in studio art. [1]
Art
Human Subjects
Cao Fei, Public Space--Give Me a Kiss, photograph of the performance, 2002.
A vein of subdued eroticism runs through Cao’s early works. Talk Without Speaking (2001) features performers using sign language to convey bold statements and questions (“Do you make love with your daughter?”). Dancing (2001) concentrates on the rhythms of a partially disrobing female figure. And in Public Space—Give Me a Kiss (2002), a man stands by the roadside doing something between dance movements and gymnastics and asking passers-by for a kiss.[2]
For the past several years she has taped Asian people of all ages in many different locales (including Guangzhou, Fukuoka, and New York) busting moves for her Hip Hop series, a paean to the liberating, culture-spanning power of physical joy.[2]
Political Subjects
Cao Fei, Rabid Dogs, still from the 8-minute video, 2002.
Exposed to countless experimental films from abroad through the cinema club established by her male companion, the writer, editor, filmmaker, and avant-garde gadfly Ou Ning (b. 1969), Cao turned broadly satiric in Rabid Dogs (2002), which shows young office workers made up with canine faces and decked out in various Burberry-plaid garments, as they cavort like dogs let loose in a modern office. The ridicule of ravenous consumerism and how it can cause subhuman behaviors among well-trained workers is heavy-handed but memorable.[2]
Cao Fei, San Yuan Li, still from the 44 minute black and white video, 2003.
Burners (2003) flirts with soft-porn fantasies but it was followed immediately by more oblique examinations of identity challenges (and games) in contemporary China. The black-and-white San Yuan Li (2003)—with its fast-paced editing and driving techno-beat soundtrack—explores the jarring physical and social changes in a former village, once a base of resistance in the Opium Wars, now swallowed up in the urban sprawl (and modern-day drug problems) of Guangzhou.[2]
In 2006, at the Taipei Biennial, Cao spanned several generations and in ideological divide by inviting her father, well known for his heroic bronzes, to sculpt a clay bust while surrounded by some of his earlier portraits of Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925), the first president of the Chinese republic and the universally acknowledged father of modern China.[2]
Fantastical Subjects
Cao Fei, Cosplayers, video still, 2005.
Cao Fei turns brightly colored and, at first blush, seemingly lighter at heart in Cosplayers (2004), which follows the fantasy enactments of young people who dress up like video-game characters and play out dreams of magical powers, mythic sexiness, and cathartic violence amid the mundanely surreal settings of real-life Gaungzhou. The visual contrasts, especially with the players’ own no-nonsense parents and their circumstribed, lower-middle-class lives, reveal the stifling discontent behind the costumed players’ games. That bittersweet dynamic is echoed in Milkman (2005), which contrasts the daily reality of a delivery-man with his vivid aspiration to be a Beijing Opera performer.[2]
Theater & Dance
Cao Fei, PRD Anti-Heroes, photograph from the Theater Project which premiered at the Guangdong Museum of Art in December, 2005.
Cao’s work also extends to dance pieces and installations. For the second Guangzhou Triennial, she put together the experimental theater performance PRD Anti-Heroes (2005), in which bright sets, wacky costumes, and exaggerated performances by a large cast were used to explore, agitprop fashion, the social and economic dislocations to which the Pearl River Delta populace is now subject.
Cao Fei, PRD Anti-Heroes, photograph from the Theater Project which premiered at the Guangdong Museum of Art in December, 2005.
When she won the Best Young Artist prize at the 2006 Chinese Contemporary Art Awards, Cao presented an installation of objects, photos, and video dealing with the daily reality and future-life fantasies of workers in the daily reality and future-life fantasies of workers in a lightbulb factory in southern Guangdong Province. The piece, mounted at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, pulled no punches in depicting the hard work and tough living conditions of the employees; a curtained bunk bed, for example, evoked dormitories in which the laborers live ten or twelve to a room, their personal expressions piled around them on mattresses and shelves. Yet Cao was equally objective in showing that the plant’s working conditions are clean and the employees diligent and mutually cooperative—in part, perhaps, because the $120 they make each month is an economic step up for these former country dwellers. In the dream-realization segments on the video Whose Utopia? What Are You Doing Here? (2006), the workers form rock bands, dance in princess costumes, or discuss what an accompanying tabloid calls “a well-off life” for young couples: “rent an apartment, obtain the city’s household registration, buy a house, and raise some children.” (A slightly spicier version has a young woman returning to her home village one day with “shap clothes and styled hair” to present her wealthy businessman beau to her family.)[2]
Second Life
Since early 2007, Cao has shifted much of her artistic activity online to the interactive realm of Second Life. There, operating under the name China Tracy, she has constructed the high-tech dystopia RMB City (which means roughly Money Town) and developed various soulful storylines with her foxy avatar. At the 2007 Venice Biennale, where she showed the cyber piece i.Mirror, she was one of four women artists representing China in its newly authorized national pavilion. Clearly, her eyes, like those of the factory workers in Whose Utopia? are turned toward the future. In the sequene of shots with which that video culminates—one earnest laborer-dreamer after another staring steadfastly back at the lens—we return, in a sense, to the Big Faces that announced the emergence of China’s post-Mao avant-garde. But much has changed. Cao’s headshots are not iconic visages. Rather, they are the living countenances—imperfect, nuanced, questioning, hopeful—of real people confronting what we might call, paraphrasing Geng Jianyi, a “third situation”: that of the roiling New China of the twenty-first century.[2]
Emergence & Reception
In 2006, Cao Fei was presented the Best Young Artist award at Uli Sigg's Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in Beijing.
Esteemed art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist calls Cao Fei "a key member of this new generation of artists."[1] In a catalogue entry for her 2009 exhibition, Utopia, he praises her skill further, calling her "the model of the artist as inventor and explorer, who with infinite curiosity acts as a witness of her time."[3] She was also included in the 2009 exhibition Younger than Jesus, the first edition of the New Museum's "Generational" triennial, featuring international artists under the age of 33.[4]
Exhibitions
Cao Fei's most recent solo exhibition was Utopia, in the summer of 2009, at Auckland, New Zealand's ArtSpace. The year before, in February of 2008, Cao's RMB City made its American debut at New York's Lombard-Fried Project.
