MODERN TIMES

Combining history, fiction and the abstract, Chinese artist Cao Fei’s dystopian artworks tackle themes such as the automation of labour, hyper-capitalism and, presciently, the effect of a global pandemic. Having just completed her first major solo show in Beijing, the prolific winner of the 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is going global, with her retro-futuristic take on contemporary life now the subject of exhibitions from Los Angeles to Rome, and a 20-page portfolio for Wallpaper

- DAVEN WU

‘Cao Fei is running late,’ says the interpreter for my interview. ‘She can’t get Zoom to work on her new computer.’ The interpreter – he’s calling in from Melbourne, and I, from Singapore – tries to set up FaceTime, but that doesn’t work either. And just as we’ve managed to log on to Google Meet, Cao comes online on Zoom from Beijing. She’s using her old laptop. ‘I’m so sorry.’

The irony of the moment looms large. Since she burst into an unsuspecting art world in 1999 with Imbalance 257 – a grainy, voyeuristic video of disaffected Chinese youth she’d shot for her third-year project at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts – Cao has become renowned for her adept fusion of technology and visual art to create surrealistic, dystopian worlds where an entire online city floats over water (RMB City: A Second Life City Planning, 2007), a man is lost in hyperspace (Nova, 2019), and a robot vacuum cleaner wanders aimlessly through rubble (Rumba II: Nomad, 2015).

‘Cao’s practice has always hovered between the real and virtual worlds,’ says Stephanie Fong, the founder of Fost Gallery in Singapore, who has been following Cao’s work since Cosplayers, 2004. ‘She was making multimedia works even before the current generation of art consumers was born.’