La Town
2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
41:56 minutes
Cao Fei
Cao Fei’s video La Town, 2014 depicts a mythical metropolis that has been destroyed by unknown forces. Although the damage is obvious, as the camera navigates across the elaborate, handmade dioramas, the inhabitants of La Town carry on with their activities and the normality of everyday life pervades. As the film progresses, the latent chaos and violence begin to emanate from every corner of the miniature city: a bloody briefcase left on the ground, a kidnapping scene, an axe murderer on the loose, a ferocious man-eating octopus—all rendering the darkness of this new post-apocalyptic world order. La Town is ridden with traces of a consumer capitalist society—such as a well known German supermarket, a McDonald’s, flickering neon Shell signs, and a movie theater playing Gone with the Wind —deliberately coupled with references to different cultures and time periods in order to make it impossible to decipher a time and place. These cultural signifiers are a reflection of Fei’s own experience of the paradoxes brought by a regime that incubated a voracious hyper-capitalism in her native Guangzhou, also known as “the world’s factory.” The dialogue in the film is based on the 1957 movie Hiroshima Mon Amour directed by Alain Resnais, with a screenplay written by Marguerite Duras. In both films we hear an ambiguous and nonlinear conversation in French where a man and a woman contradict each other, extenuating the discrepancy between what is and isn’t real. As with her virtual works La Town uses the city to address Fei’s ongoing concerns: the inaccuracy of memory, forgetfulness, and a tacit existentialism as we search for a greater truth in different facets of everyday life.
Cao Fei is a celebrated multimedia artist known for works that focus on the interplay between real and fictional worlds. Working across photography, performance, video, and digital media, her practice vividly reflects the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century and the role that image production has played in shaping youth culture in a digital era. Influenced by an array of forms of global pop culture—from Cantonese Pop and Japanese anime to American hip-hop—a common thread in her practice is the merging of everyday life with new forms of technology as a means to unveil society’s unfulfilled desires. Her pivotal film Whose Utopia , for example, showcases assembly line workers in a factory in China as they act out their aspirations in a backdrop of industrial machinery. In another key body of work, RMB City, Fei created a virtual city through the platform Second Life —an online space that mimics ‘the real world’—as a vehicle to express ideas that relate to modernization, capitalism, and consumer culture. Through these constructed worlds, Fei presents a profound meditation on the boundaries between the real and the fantastic and the sense of alienation that drives new generations to increasingly experience the world behind the veneer of their Avatars. For Fei, the digital world is an expression of our human condition, and as such, an avenue to reflect on these emerging forms of social consciousness.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » THEARTNEWSPER
Tania Bruguera’s reading at Hamburger Bahnhof shut down after heated pro-Palestine protests Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Israel-Hamas war news Tania Bruguera’s reading at Hamburger Bahnhof shut down after heated pro-Palestine protests A statement from the museum says the incident involved activists using “hate speech” towards one of the readers and a museum director Gareth Harris 12 February 2024 Share Tania Bruguera invited artists, activists and members of the public, read from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism © Estudio Bruguera / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jacopo La Forgia The artist and activist Tania Bruguera’s non-stop reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin was halted on Saturday (10 February) after pro-Palestine protestors disrupted the event...
© » KADIST
Mona Marzouk
2014Trayvon is a series of acrylic paintings by Mona Marzouk that engages the courtroom as its points of departure...
© » KADIST
QALQALAH 1, an editorial project by Kadist Art Foundation and Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris >>> To download in the “Attachment section” on the right side of the page In echo of their respective programs, Kadist Art Foundation and Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research are launching the joint publication Qalqalah , a “reader” gathering contributions from artists and researchers on a variety of interlinked issues...
© » KADIST
Sabelo Mlangeni
2019The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together...
© » KADIST
Hana Miletic
2019Incompatibles (Unitas) is made from discarded samples of the yarns that are exported from Croatia and not actually available in the local market...
© » SLASH PARIS
Natalia Jaime-Cortez — Hier j’ai vu une baleine dans la Seine — Espace d’art contemporain Camille Lambert — Exhibition — Slash Paris Login Newsletter Twitter Facebook Natalia Jaime-Cortez — Hier j’ai vu une baleine dans la Seine — Espace d’art contemporain Camille Lambert — Exhibition — Slash Paris English Français Home Events Artists Venues Magazine Videos Back Previous Next Natalia Jaime-Cortez — Hier j’ai vu une baleine dans la Seine Exhibition Drawing, installation, mixed media Hier j’ai vu une baleine dans la Seine 2023 Natalia Jaime-Cortez Natalia Jaime-Cortez Hier j’ai vu une baleine dans la Seine Ends in about 2 months: February 3 → March 30, 2024 Le travail de Natalia Jaime-Cortez se déploie, ou plutôt se déplie, et relève d’un engagement corporel de l’artiste dont les papiers suspendus viennent dessiner des lignes dans l’espace...
© » KADIST
Randa Maddah
2017Shot from the rooftop of her house in Majdal Shams, through a complex construction of moving mirrors, this video connects both sides of the border which has cut through Syrian Golan heights since the 1967 Six-Day war...