Cao Fei by Elsa Ferreira
For the past twenty years, the Chinese artist Cao Fei has been patiently and poetically exploring the technological and social transformations of her country through video. An exhibition of her work will be held in Paris this summer.
“Some people say I’m a sociologist,” Cao Fei says. Born in 1978, Cao Fei (pronounced Tsao Fay) has a watchful eye on people and the world around them. Ever since her first video Imbalance 257 made in 1999, the Guangzhou native and daughter of an accomplished sculptor has set out in search of discovering communities and their ecosystems. In 2004, she filmed COSplayers, which shines the light on young people who dress up as and play the role of video-game characters. For i.Mirror (2007) and RMB City (2007-2011), she explored the virtual world of Second Life. She recorded the experiences of her avatar and artistic alter ego, China Tracy, and built a pixelated city to explore the boundaries between the physical and digital existence. After exhibitions at some of the most prestigious art institutions in the world (the Guggenheim and Met in New York, the Venice Biennale, the Tate in London), Fei presents her latest exhibition “HX” at the Centre Pompidou. This long-term research project explores Beijing’s Hongxia neighborhood, the city’s artistic lung that’s falling prey to gentrification. Her show is accompanied by the science-fiction film Nova.
“HX” is an immersive piece, a signature feature of this patiently dedicated artist. In 2006, she revealed one of her major artworks, Whose Utopia?, a poetic portrayal into the depths of a light-bulb factory in the Pearl River Delta, China’s regional economic powerhouse. She shined the spotlight on factory workers in their place of work and brought their most personal aspirations to life. We see a young woman dressed as a ballet dancer among the machines and a man playing an electric guitar.
Fei distributed questionnaires to more than five hundred workers, asking them about their interests and what they think about before heading off to work. She organized workshops asking participants to draw their interpretation of utopia. “One worker drew one of the items produced at the factory,” Fei says. “The worker said it lit up their life and hopes, and powered their dreams.” She exposes the contradiction between individual perception and an often alienating environment where the only private space workers have are bunk beds in the worker dormitories, which measure less than two square meters. In 2018, the artist filmed Asia One in the first automated package-sorting warehouse in the world. “Technology has developed far beyond what we ever imagined,” she observes. Here, only two humans supervise the factory in which the robots are capable of giving them a “trust score.” Fei defends herself against any link to the social credit system that the Chinese state rolled out in 2018. “I wanted to show that robots have their own processes which are simple and arbitrary. This poses problems since it’s a social system which relies on black and white mechanisms and an electronic evaluation.”
After looking at industrial production, the artist next took an interest in the prison system with Prison Architect (2018), which was filmed in a former detention center. There’s continuity in her work since she likes to “base part of her creativity on a certain reality,” which, she says, “leads to a fictional narrative based upon a structure of reality.” The result is a poetic interpretation of society.
“CAO FE, HX,” CENTRE POMPIDOU IN PARIS, TILL AUGUST 26.