Since 2007, Cao Fei has radically focused her work on Second Life, an online space that virtually mimics “the real world” and includes everything from the expression of ideas to economic investment. Referring to China’s modernization and its capitalist and utopic visions, RMB City explores the ways in which global communication impacts imagination, values, and ways of life. By appropriating virtual reality, Cao Fei opens up a new frontier in the field of art production that surpasses conventional materiality and invites collaboration and exchanges with her public and clients.
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.
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water...
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials...
Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Although seemingly unadorned at first glance, Yang Xinguang’s sculptural work Phenomena (2009) employs minimalist aesthetics as a means of gesturing towards the various commonalities and conflicts between civilization and the natural world...
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...
The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...
A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...