While this exhibition feels as if it is riding the wave of contemporary immersive exhibition making, it has to be remembered that Cao Fei (pronounced Tsow Fay) is a pioneer in this realm, and has been creating experimental and immersive artworks for decades.
Cao’s work came to prominence as China’s own rise found its footing. She was born in 1978, the same year as Chairman Deng Xiaoping introduced the ‘Reform and Opening-up’ program, and her hometown of Guangzhou became the epicentre of this new world of manufacturing that flooded out to the West, while popular culture flooded in.
It was a highway of exchange that the co-curator of the exhibition, Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd, likens to a wormhole that can transport you to other worlds and other futures at lightning speed. Indeed the Sydney-exclusive exhibition Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆, at the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW), may make viewers feel as if they have entered that wormhole.
Real and virtual worlds and futurist dreamings are seemingly compressed into a multiverse where an enormous soft sculpture blue octopus, a recreation of Sydney’s now closed, iconic yum cha restaurant the Marigold, Pearl Delta factory workers and a Second Life other world coexist as ushers and avatars of our shared future. It is edgy, it is fun and visitors can get lost in it for hours, moving between zones or city characters with a kind of pop-ish awe and amusement.
So how do viewers navigate that enormity? The artist has worked with Hong Kong’s Beau Architects to transform the lower galleries of AGNSW’s Naala Badu (north building) into a pulsating cityscape. The exhibition aims to metaphorically encapsulate a contemporary urban China, and echoes Arrowsmith-Todd’s description of Cao’s lived experience, where China’s “villages turned into suburbs, turned into cities, turned into high-rise megalopolises”.
That said, this is an exhaustive exhibition with hours of screen time surveying Cao’s 30-year career. Many of the videos have a durational aspect to them – both in their making and in their viewing – while others have a cyclical quality, revised across time, such as her Hip Hop video series, which began in 2003, were repeated in 2006, and have been reworked for this exhibition with a Sydney inflection.
It is clear to even the tech un-savvy that Cao has been an early adopter of technology, and viewers are witness to her dexterity moving from photography to DV-camcorder, to pioneering net art, virtual reality, video games and interactive installations. Overall, the exhibition captures the chaotic, slightly irreverent, tone of riding that wave.
But those spiralling developments are always metered against loss – displacement within a city as it is razed, loss of the individual, loss of community. This is captured in two anchor points for the exhibition: its entrance, which is a recreation of the lobby of the Hongxia cinema in Beijing where factory workers would meet, and the now closed (2021) Marigold yum cha restaurant in Sydney, which was again a ritualistic meeting point for diasporic communities, now legendary in urban folklore.
Viewers literally move beyond that nostalgic Sino-Soviet cinema lobby to the factory floor, taking a wormhole to the Pearl River Delta where the Siemens lightbulb factory is located. Cao embedded herself with its employees to create Whose Utopia (2006), a multidimensional installation that also includes a VR component. It is at once familiar, strange and otherworldly – with a dose of voyeuristic zeal and heartfelt connections.
There is no correct way to move through this exhibition, and its central zone opens up. Likening it to a video game, it is almost as if it comprises levels that open for playing.
One of the highlights in this area is the video Cosplayers 2004, one of her more renowned works. As Arrowsmith-Todd explains in the exhibition’s publication, “For Cao, cyberspace has never been a separate realm,” adding she has “an eye for the bizarre collisions of globalised culture”.
Cao taps a generation of Chinese youth, and the next wormhole between time and space shoots the viewer to her embrace of the online platform Second Life, which began in 2006 as the cyberpunk avatar China Tracy. It is almost as if we are growing up in double-speed with Cao on her technological journey.
Titled RMB City (2007-11), it captures a period of utopian idealism, of building new future worlds of global citizens. A lot has been written about this work as a landmark piece of early internet art, and it is great to have it in Sydney.
The exhibition continues to transport viewers, and the next move is from that megalopolis to small town thinking, taking the pendulum swing from optimism to disillusionment, a topic again explored in the video Asia One (2018) where a distribution centre’s only remaining employees are assisted by robots. It’s cutesy, it’s clinical, it’s frightening, it’s familiar.
A favourite for many visiting the exhibition, however, will be the new music video, Hip hop: Sydney 2024, filmed in more than 20 locations across Sydney’s Haymarket and Burwood Chinatowns, with a cast of over 60 community members – from Benjamin Law and Claudia Chan Shaw to young cosplayers and 86-year-old George Wing Kee. What I love about its placement is that you can sit in a pool of blue-toned foam cubes and just kick back and absorb it all.
Additional to the Marigold installation, two other commissions have been made for the Sydney exhibition. Hovering overhead is the new animated commission, Super delivery: Sydney (2024) displayed on the monumental screen between gallery levels. The second – in a generous act – sees Cao hand over part of the space to an installation, Golden wattle 2024, which pays homage to her late sister, the artist Cao Xiaoyun (1971–2022), who lived in Sydney. It feels a little out of sync with the rest of the show, but also honours voices lost in a city’s noise.
Read: Exhibition review: Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory, MCA
Overall, one of the successes of this exhibition is that it can be engaged with in any order, and at any level. Viewers can keep getting lost, discovering and getting caught in eddies of childlike play. In some ways, it is overwhelming – while also being exhilarating – and it takes the fear out of technology.
It has an inherent optimism, despite its warnings of new world greed and urbanisations and, as the exhibition’s title My City is Yours encourages, shape-shifting futures are in the hands of global citizens connected through humanity. It is a good reminder, in our spiralling contemporary world, to hold onto those humanist tenets regardless of whether we are formed as individuals, collectives or virtually, as cyborgs, robots or future generations.
Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Naala Badu Building
30 November 2024 – 13 April 2025
Sydney International Art Series
Curators: Art Gallery of New South Wales curator of film, Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd, and curator of Chinese art, Yin Cao,
Ticketed.
