W.hen Chinese contemporary artist Cao Fei was negotiating her solo exhibition at the modern art wing of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Naala Badu, she insisted it would not be a traditional “soft light in a white square box” effort. .
The Guangzhou-born artist, who has strong ties to Sydney (a sister city to the sprawling Chinese port city), wanted her show to capture the sass and bustle of a busy shopping center or market.
Consequently, in Cao Fei: My City is Yours (曹斐: 欢迎登陆), the gallery walls become scaffolding, while the music and sound effects of its various installations (a theater, a restaurant, a factory) merge with each other, competing for the viewer’s attention. attention.
“It’s not a criticism of the European (style), but normally we see a lot of videos (installed) in a white cube… and you see the curator turning the volume down, quieter or cleaner,” Cao told Guardian Australia. .
“But I want my exhibition to reflect my personality and experience. In my city there is always a lot of construction, a lot of demolition and reconstruction. This is my material.”
My City is Yours is the Beijing-based artist’s first major solo exhibition in Australia, featuring key works from a 20-year career spanning film, photography, metaverse experiments and large-scale interactive installations spread across AGNSW and the Art Museum Sydney Contemporary. .
Much of Cao’s career has been dedicated to examining the phenomenal technological and social transformations that have taken place in China over the past quarter century. He has had solo exhibitions in Beijing, London, Paris and New York, and last year he reached the top 10 of ArtReview Power 100 Listwhere she was described as “a leading figure in the vision of our metaverse-tinged future.”
AGNSW visitors enter the exhibition through a time capsule: the Hongxia Theater, a cinema built in Beijing in the 1960s. For six years, until it was demolished in 2021, Cao rented the real Hongxia Theater as a space of study.
Passing the formal mahogany reception desk, decorated with gaudy plastic flowers and surrounded by faded wallpaper, the viewer enters a compact auditorium where a dozen spartan seats, borrowed from the original theater, face a screen projecting the Cao’s 2019 feature film, Nova, una science. -fi story about a computer scientist whose son becomes trapped in cyberspace after an experiment goes horribly wrong. The boy has 40 years to find his way back; 40 years is also the duration of China’s post-socialist transition.
Wormholes and time travel are recurring themes for Cao, whose desire to “escape the timeline and just swim through it” is reflected in this installation, with sand that appears to cascade from the screen. , transforming the auditorium floor into a beach.
Another time capsule will provoke nostalgia for many Sydneysiders: Cao has recreated part of the large dining room at Marigold, the much-loved Chinatown restaurant that closed during Covid-19. Cao rescued some of the yum cha palace’s spacious round tables covered in white linen, bright red and gold furniture and dim sum carts, recreating it a year later.
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Goodbye, Marigold! It is one of three Sydney-specific installations in the exhibition. In his ongoing series Hip Hop, Cao captures locals playing in Chinese communities in various cities; In turn, AGNSW commissioned Hip Hop Sydney, which features more than 60 Chinese Sydneysiders aged between nine and 90, dancing to the music of 1,300 local Korean-Australian musicians.
The artist’s fascination with music video culture dates back to her childhood in Guangzhou. Cao has written about He grew up “in the first mainland city to open up to the world” in the 1990s, as “pop culture gradually infiltrated” China.
“I spent my entire teenage years captive to music video culture, as well as Hollywood movies, Western TV shows, etc.,” she wrote. in an essay for Artforum. “These media were an explosive cultural stimulus for my generation in China. I fell in love with MTV for a while, imitating the dances and fashions I saw in the videos. I listened to pop music on my Walkman on the way to and from school, and the fruits of my diligent study were obvious every time I hit the dance floor. I even danced in some local television commercials.”
Cao turns down the volume for a shrine-like corner dedicated to his sister, Cao Xiaoyun, also an artist and long-time Sydney resident until she died of cancer at the age of 50 in 2022. Golden Wattle features archival footage, family photographs and artwork painted by Xiaoyun; It takes its title from Xiaoyun’s love of Australia’s national flower, with its vibrant greens and golds.
Mounted on the wall as part of the work is a four-page letter, written in Mandarin and translated into English, that Cao sent to his sister from Beijing shortly after his death.
“Influenced by our parents, we all studied art, but you are more of an ‘artist’ than Cao Dan (Cao’s other brother) and I,” Cao writes. “You were never tied to material life and only listened to the call of your heart.”
“My sister never had a show in Sydney,” Cao tells Guardian Australia. “I consider it a gift to her, even if she can’t see it.”