As a leading member of China’s avant-garde, Cao Fei uses multimedia formats film, video, virtual reality, and installation to surreally depict the dramatic social changes of a globalizing China and the state of the individual under such conditions. Cao Fei’s UCCA exhibition, her first major solo show in China, assembles works from different periods of her artistic career and situates her practice within the context of the country’s profound social upheavals. The exhibition features celebrated works such as Whose Utopia (2006), RMB City (2007-2011), Haze and Fog (2013), and La Town (2014), as well as the artist’s recent piece Asia One (2018) and her latest series, “Hongxia” (2019-2020), both of which will be presented in China for the first time. Throughout her practice, Cao Fei has consistently focused on the complicated social pressures emerging from the entanglement of popular culture, technological development, and urban change, fluidly shifting between documenting reality and creating fantasy in her art. In recent years, she has undertaken long-term historical and interdisciplinary research to make work that questions the role of the individual within historical transformation, reimagining approaches towards individuality, society, history, and temporality. 

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UCCA website

Cao Fei’s first major institutional show in the UK, Blueprints features work from 2006–2020 and includes the premiere of her first virtual reality work, The Eternal Wave, produced in collaboration with Acute Art, and the UK premiere of new film Nova. At the centre of Cao Fei's exhibition is an impulse for world-building, to imagine and construct new universes for her characters that traverse past, present and future time frames. This mode of magical thinking leads to the creation of spaces that are both real and fictional, physical and virtual, a series of blueprints that takes us beyond a singular, everyday reality. This project is the third time that she has participated in the Galleries’ artistic programme; firstly, as part of China Power Station: Part 1, an offsite Serpentine exhibition at Battersea Power Station in 2006, where the artist presented her film Whose Utopia, and then in 2008, with the installation of RMB City in the Serpentine Gallery foyer. Accompanying Blueprints is a programme of cinema screenings of Cao Fei’s work in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, in partnership with Everyman Cinemas.

Prison Architect takes inspiration from the sombre histories of the Victoria Prison, located in the earliest penal structure complex built in Hong Kong under British colonial rules. Filming on site of the original prison, now the important part of Tai Kwun - the Centre for Heritage and Arts, opened in June 2018 after ten years of restoration work. The two protagonists: a prisoner and an architect living in parallel realities (in the present time and an ambiguous distanced past), conjure up imagination and experiences about imprisonment. And time presents the artist's debate on the relations of humans, the world, and freedom - the visible and the invisible imprisonment, existentialism as a means of self-redemption, and questioning at once the relationship of humans to the space around them. The artist's attempt at reconciliation with the world and human nature.

Prison Architect showing dates during Berlinale:
2019-02-08 20:00 Werkstattkino@silent green
2019-02-12 15:00 Arsenal 1