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.
Categorized as low-level literature, a “Love Stories” book is a romantic popular fiction of proletariat China, read mainly by teenagers, students, and young workers...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...
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...
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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...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement...
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...
The black-and-white projection, Araf by Didem Pekün, begins, as a lithe man stands high up in the middle of the grand, rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina...
Simpson’s sculptural practice connects architecture, clothing, furniture and the body to explore the functional and sociological roles and the influence of the design and architecture of various cultures and periods in history...