Here, the artist's work reminds us that new technologies and digital storytelling can both support empowerment and be used as instruments of control.
In the 80s, Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman conceived the idea of a “Liquid Society,” describing a contemporary societal framework characterized by constant change, mobility and uncertainty, resulting in an extreme porosity and fluidity between multiple experiences and narrative dimensions, where social structures and identities are constantly shifting. Since the 90s, Chinese artist Cao Fei has embarked on a relentless exploration of today’s “liquid society,” questioning modes of production, communication and experience in the new global media and technological age while focusing on the accelerated modernization in China she experienced while growing up.
The Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai just opened her first large-scale mid-career retrospective (jointly curated by a trio of renowned curators from China and abroad, including Nancy Spector from the United States, Xue Tan from Hong Kong and Yang Beichen from Beijing) acknowledging Fei as one of the most important contemporary Chinese artists to date. Notably, the exhibition also marks the museum’s first large-scale show with new media and the first solo show dedicated to a female artist—and they chose one of the most progressive and provocative they could get, which makes quite a statement in the status of opinion control of the country.
The show’s title, “Tidal Flux,” directly evokes Bauman’s notion of a liquid society. In it, the term “flux” (Chinese: “Zhou He”) is derived from the classic text Guanzi from the 7th Century BC. It describes a harmonious state of living in symbiosis with everything between heaven and earth, while “Tidal” symbolizes the continuum and fluctuation of life and the cosmos and emphasizes existence’s flow, relationships and ever-shifting nature.
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With a labyrinthine exhibition journey and highly theatrical setting, the show gathers some of the artist’s most relevant projects in something like a videogame experience, divided into fragmented chapters leading to different words. The Hong Kong-based architectural firm BEAU did a great job here, designing an exhibition display with the artist that perfectly translates this idea of fluid “worldbuilding,” extending it beyond the digital realm into the design of the museum space. Creating a series of metal boxes for each chapter, the display continuously encourages experiences of “disorientation” and “serendipity,” facilitating easier access to this densely narrative space in an interactive and immersive manner.
Occupying the entirety of the museum’s second-floor space, “Tidal Flux” has three sections, reflecting the main three poles our existence gravitates around today: “Time,” “Body” and “Technology.” As Cao Fei explains in one of the quotes on the wall, her practice explores “how virtual environments shape our experiences, identities and social interactions.”
The journey starts with her epic project RMB City (RMB – To be ReMember), which first brought Fei international attention. It invites visitors to dive into the fiction and simulation of this wondrous and bustling immersive parallel metropolis Fei built in Second Life, being one of the first artists pioneering the digital and virtual realms in the “metaverse.” Her avatar, China Acy, serves as the city’s guardian spirit and head proprietress: an adventurous, fearless, whimsical and dazzling digital presence who guides us into this utopian or potential dystopian parallel reality where everything is in continuous growth, evolution and development. With RMB City, Fei has created a powerful metaphor for the accelerated modernization process that China went through, which interrupted a secular order of natural rhythms and rural traditions.
Born into an artistic family in Guangzhou, Cao Fei’s formative years coincided with the trailblazing wave of China’s Economic Reform. In the last decades of the 20th Century, she witnessed significant changes in the country amidst rapid development in the Pearl River Delta region, with a surging desire for development attracting an influx of migrant workers, earning this region its famed title, “The World’s Factory.” Meanwhile, the Pearl River Delta also became a frontier of cultural heterogenization in China due to the influence of foreign culture, its geographical proximity to Hong Kong and the introduction of Western pop music enabled by access to “Dakou records” in Guangzhou.
An idea of the cultural and societal framework where the artists first started to move is given by a series of early works (1995-2005) arbitrarily arranged in stations placed in a gallery with a spectacular view of the city. Here, visitors can see sets from the stage play Campus Rhapsody 2 (1995) created during her art school years to more conceptual yet enjoyable works like Dance (2001) or the subsequent dance series of Hip Hop (2003-2004), which through music draws unexpected yet very revealing parallels that connected China already with the global culture. Other, like Talk without Speaking (2001), low-budget short films Imbalance 257 (1999) and Milk (2005) and the experimental documentary San Yuan Li (2003) are chronicles of Guangzhou’s urban villages, filmed using a mobile handheld video camcorder, often featuring the artist’s friends or non-professional extras. Rarely seen, those early works reveal the imaginative, audaciously experimental and playful genesis of Cao Fei’s work, often inventively blending everyday life and theatricality, fiction and reality, to subtly highlight cultural and societal changes and perfectly capture the essence of the local scene, in different communities (from art schools students to workers) on such a transformational era.
As the artist stresses in one of the nearby quotes: “I come from the pre-internet era, and what moves me is the relationship formed through emotions, people, objects and the world, not only algorithms and data.”
The remarkable ability of the artist to creatively move between the virtual and physical realms, between fiction and facts, is what allows Cao Fei’s research on digital experiences and simulations to collide with a deeper sociopolitical and psychological analysis of the dynamics of power, control and production in today’s China and the world. Eventually, the exhibition proves how the virtual utopia researched by Cao Fei most often collides with the reality of the political utopia of development pursued by the Chinese Government.
Quite significant in this sense are projects like Whose Utopia (2006), which was also shown at MoMA in 2019, in which Fei sheds light on the social and labor dynamics behind one of the largest manufacturers of light bulbs in the world, the OSRAM lighting factory in the Pearl River Delta region. According to Fei, the project aimed to “release the workers from a standardized notion of productivity.” For six months, the artist worked with them to enact their inner dreams, turning a space of high control into a stage of creative expression that escapes all mere logic of productivity. In subsequent works Asia One and 11.11, both completed in 2018, Fei continues her concern with individual loneliness and employs the factory as her “field” of research, trying to envision a more creative form of worker life emerging in the era of manufacturing automation.
Notably, between societal investigations and collective performances, these video works are contextualized in the show within sets of objects, such as these dystopian stacks of boxes labeled as “Utopia Factory,” which expand the narrative from the video to the space.
Similarly, Hongxia project (2015-2024), one of Cao Fei’s most ambitious long-term projects, attempts to formulate an epic, polyphonic narrative that could preserve local memories of a controversial chapter in China’s recent history and at the same time, explore the past and imagine alternative stores. The project started with the story of the Hongxia Theater but then expanded in a broader attempt to preserve the oral stories of an entire disappearing community of factories in suburban East Beijing, which, with the Soviet and East German help in the 1950s, had become integral to the socialist industrialization movement in the newly established People’s Republic of China. With the ascendance of the Chinese electronics industry, young people from around the country flocked there, fighting for chances to work and enrich their lives and families in Beijing’s Jiuxianqiao area. The population boom resulted in a housing shortage, which the factories solved by adopting the Soviet Khrushchyovka residential model and building worker communities. However, the utopia soon collapsed in inefficiency, with the communal buildings lacking upkeep. As the market economy gradually replaced the planned economy in the 1980s, Jiuxianqiao’s fate was sealed by evictions and demolitions at the end of 2023. In Hongxia ( 019), Cao Fei interviews retired workers from the 738 and 774 factories who had lived in the local community, the former manager of Hongxia Theater, the children of the factory workers and urban historians, architects and photographers who followed the community’s transformation. As an archeologist, Cao Fei pursued this merciless excavation, unveiling and recovering many threads of a long-neglected story, with all the fate of the Chinese people it shaped.
As elsewhere in the show, the videos are complemented by a series of installations in the space, featuring as archeological findings both fictional and factual documents, photos and memorabilia, as well as entire interiors that expand once again the narrative while shedding light on the implication between this “advanced” electronics industrial production and Sino-Soviet relations during the Cold War. Not surprisingly, we find references to the race to space, which culminates in another output of this project: the sci-fi feature-length film Nova (presented as the opening film of the FIRST International Film Festival in 2020) and the virtual reality work The Eternal Wave VR (2020), Cao Fei’s first virtual reality work, which takes further this exploration of virtuality, reality and the perception of self in relationship with a technology once used to re-enact, re-explore and re-imagine the past. The final addition, An Elegy to Hongxia (2024), closes the project, leaving a bitter sense of collective anguish with the demolition of the theater, which symbolically cancels a historical space and time.
In one of the following rooms, the show unveils for the first time Fei’s latest ongoing project, the Dash project (a working title), where the artist envisions a new “agricultural futurism,” where “unmanned” agriculture is brought to life through the collaborative efforts of drones hovering in the air and ground-based robots performing farming tasks as if positioning themselves as the next generation of “farmers.” In this way, Fei forges a new link between futurism and the ancient traditions of humanity.
Being a pioneer of this futuristic virtual worldbuilding, Cao Fei returned her focus to cyberspace in 2022 as the “metaverse” gained wider acceptance with other recent works presented toward the end of the show. For instance, in the film Meta-mentary (2022), she documented people’s evolving, sometimes hilarious opinions about the metaverse, while in Duotopia (2022-2024), the artist creates a complex layering and interlacing of numerous utopian realms, to envision possibilities of the future and aesthetics. Presented on vertical screens reminding one of mobile phones, Oz (2022) features her new avatar, an androgynous figure—already a post-human creature who lives in this fluid but somehow foretelling status between machine, octopus and anthropoid. Note: these works were presented last year in her show at Sprüth Magers in Berlin.
It takes some time to elaborate and understand the depth of such an extensive and complex exhibition as the one Cao Fei has put together at the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai. Spanning decades of her work, this comprehensive showcase intertwines urban life, popular culture and technology with critical examination while exploring various possible realities and perspectives beyond the main narrative and official version of history.
The exhibition not only highlights Fei’s artistic genius but also offers a critical commentary on modern Chinese history. Through reimagining and reinterpretation of the past and present, Fei issues a compelling call for greater sociopolitical and technological awareness. Her message feels particularly relevant in our interconnected world, where similar power, control and storytelling dynamics are ever-present. With democratic rights at threat and geopolitical tensions rising, Cao Fei’s work reminds us that new technologies and digital storytelling can be used as tools for empowerment and instruments of control.
“Cao Fei: Tidal Flux” is on view at the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai through November 17.
