Cao Fei
Cao Fei is an internationally-renowned Chinese contemporary artist. Currently living in Beijing, she mixes social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to Surrealism, and documentary conventions in her films and installations. Her works reflect on the rapid and developmental changes that are occurring in Chinese society today.
Cao Fei's works have been exhibited at a number of international biennales and triennales, including the Shanghai Biennale (2004), the Moscow Biennale (2005), the Taipei Biennial (2006), the 15th & 17th Biennale of Sydney (2006 and 2010), the Istanbul Biennial (2007), the Yokohama Triennale (2008) and the 50th, 52nd & 56th Venice Biennale (2003, 2007 and 2015).
Cao Fei’s major projects in recent years include a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York (2016), the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2018), a solo show at the Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2018), a retrospective at K21 Düsseldorf (2018), a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019), a solo exhibition Blueprints at the Serpentine Galleries, London (2020). Cao Fei’s recent projects include a major retrospective Staging the Era at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2021), and a solo exhibition at the MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome (2021).
Cao Fei is a professor and a master advisor of the School of Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. She was also on the jury of The Selection Committee for the Curatorship of the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014), the jury of The Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary (2016), and the jury of Hugo Boss Asia Art Prize (2019). Cao Fei is the nominator of the Rolls-Royce Art Program Muse (2019) and the winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2021).
Last update on 10-03-2023
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Featured Artworks
The main subject of Give Me a Kiss - the dancing man - seems to be isolated from the world around him despite his placement in the centre of the city. His actions, in which he dances, smiles, and gestures towards the people passing by, indicate a moment frozen in time, further emphasised by the use of black and white film and old music.
His physical existence is felt through movement, expression, and emotion, but is met with resistance from his environment, suggesting that the world he finds himself if no longer has room for him, neither physically nor spiritually.
The physical interactions and experiences shared between people, which Fei essentialises through dance, are being slowly engulfed by the rapid urbanisation of space and culture. Small spaces within the city are being replaced with crowded buildings and communities are replaced with anonymity, indicating that spaces of coexistence in a physical realm are no longer guaranteed.
Exhibiting Give Me a Kiss online offers an extension to the physical spaces it depicts and further echoes the new ways in which we seek to find a space for ourselves, both in digital and physical realms.
Give Me a Kiss
2002
Video
The Foundry
Events
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Digital Bodies is an online group show curated by Stina Gustafsson, Chloe Diamond, Serena Tabacchi and Marie Chatel featuring works by Cao Fei, Damjanksi, Frenetik Void, Hackatao, Hu Weiyi, Joanne Hastie, Lin Tianmiao, Maurice Benayoun, Miao Xiaochun, Skygolpe, The Fabricant, Travis LeRoy Southworth, and Twistedsister.
“Within the digital realm, the body becomes something we can no longer touch or feel. Often, it stands detached from our actions, forcing us into new ways of associating, observing, and thinking about the body and its relationship to space.
The human body has dominated artistic visions for centuries. With the emergence of new digital instruments comes new ways of exploring what role the body plays in both physical and virtual environments. Fluid boundaries where we alternate between our real and virtual lives imply that our understanding of the body is detached and outdated.
In this exhibition, MoCDA presents artworks that challenge existing notions of the body by exploring the ways in which they are represented across media and how the representation has evolved within a digital sphere. In the first collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art and the DSL Collection, presented for CADAF Online 2020, MoCDA seeks to examine the bodily structures that are increasingly challenged and questioned as our daily life is transported, shaped, and augmented by digital technologies.”
(The curators)