Installation view of “Cao Fei: Staging the Era”  UCCA solo exhibition, photo: Stefen Chow, 2021

Cao Fei’s first major solo show in China and largest and most comprehensive career retrospective to date assembles works from the artist’s two decade-long career, situating the threads present in her diverse practice amidst rapid development in contemporary society.

This exhibition is at once a retrospective—Cao Fei’s largest and most comprehensive to date, and her first in China—and an immersive experience that invites us into her creative mind, as realized in the exhibition design by Hong Kong studio Beau Architects. “Cao Fei: Staging the Era” is accompanied by the publication of the catalogue HX (2021), developed alongside “HX” project as a counterpart to the artworks and documents Cao Fei’s extensive research process. Rather than a linear exposition, this exhibition is a site of exploration, a place to wander, observe, think, and play, where we view her art as we also look to each other and to the historical moment we inhabit together. Perhaps this is Cao Fei’s special contribution to the global history of art: a sense, at once personal and epochal, sentimental and monumental, meditative and performative, of belonging to this particular here and now—a stage for our era.

This exhibition was curated by Philip Tinari, Guo Xi, Patrick Rhine, and Huang Jiehua, and was organized by Liu Kaiyun, Edward Guan, Shi Yao, and Anna Yang.