曹斐 Cao Fei

Cao Fei to be Announced Artist by TRACK @S.M.A.K, Ghent, Belgium
2012.05.12 – 2012.09.16

100 DAYS BEFORE TRACK
ARTISTS ANNOUNCED

© S.M.A.K.
TRACK
A Contemporary City Conversation

TRACK is a temporary exhibition in the public and semi-public space of the city of Ghent. Philippe Van Cauteren and Mirjam Varadinis invited 35 artists to make an in-depth exploration of six typical neighbourhoods in Ghent and to come up with artistic proposals that interact with the different communities in various ways. The curators took the time to select surprising, meaningful and hidden locations in the wider city centre of Ghent and invited artists who have an affinity with the thematic context of the various places. The selected artists use the local reality as a fertile source of inspiration to reflect upon the city and the contemporary human condition in a global light. The results of their explorations are not simply traditional works of art, but artistic projects with an intense relationship with the city and its inhabitants that will leave permanent traces.

TRACK was initiated by S.M.A.K. It continues the tradition established by the large-scale exhibition projects Chambres d’Amis (1986) and Over the Edges (2000), that had installed contemporary art in the context of the city and entered into a direct dialogue with the public.

More info:

www.track.be

www.e-flux.com/announcements/announcing-artists-for-track/
Game On / Re-Newing Media Art: A Touring Initiative, Ireland
2012.03.02 – 2012.03.30

Cao Fei, “Live in RMB City,” 2009, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing.

Game On / Re-Newing Media Art is a touring screening programme of artist’s film and video works that utilise the imagery and media of desktop interfaces, video games and online software. Curated by Chris Clarke (Curator of Education and Collections, Lewis Glucksman Gallery). Game On explores the ways in which contemporary artists appropriate and manipulate extant online materials and applications, often in order to challenge the rhetoric of user-interactivity and to highlight the aesthetics of the computer screen.

While new media artists have often explored computer technologies in their practices, the featured artists in Game On appropriate existing software; an approach shared with hackers and ‘hacktivists’ who often re-programme mass-produced video games and applications as a strategy of subversion. While hacking has generally concerned itself with forms of sabotage through computer viruses and website vandalism, the artists here use widely-available software to create films that emphasise the aesthetic qualities of the virtual landscape.

Artists: Peggy Ahwesh (US), Paul B. Davis (US), Michael Bell-Smith (US), Cao Fei (CN), Faith Denham (IE), JODI (NL), Oliver Laric (AT), Conor McGarrigle (IE), Takeshi Murata (US)

More info:

www.glucksman.org

www.e-flux.com/announcements/game-on-re-newing-media-art-a-touring-initiative/
Cao Fei: Simulus, Surrey Art Gallery, Vancouver Canada
2012.04.07 - 2012.06.10

Cao Fei: Simulus

Incorporating elements of video-game interactivity and cinematic viewing, gallery visitors will experience an uncanny parallel city that has been created through the virtual computing community known as Second Life. China’s dynamic new urban landscapes inform a future threatened by uncertain ecological transformation in Cao Fei’s re-imagined China.

Presented as part of Yellow Signal: New Media from China that takes place across Metro Vancouver in the spring of 2012.

Cao Fei: Simulus

Incorporating elements of video-game interactivity and cinematic viewing, gallery visitors will experience an uncanny parallel city that has been created through the virtual computing community known as Second Life. China’s dynamic new urban landscapes inform a future threatened by uncertain ecological transformation in Cao Fei’s re-imagined China.

Presented as part of Yellow Signal: New Media from China that takes place across Metro Vancouver in the spring of 2012.

http://www.surrey.ca/culture-recreation/1566.aspx
SHOW TIME: Choreography in Contemporary Art, Denmark
2012.01.27 – 2012.03.25

Cao Fei, My Future is Not a Dream 02, 2006. Digital c-print, 120 x 150 cm.*

The exhibition SHOW TIME brings together eight artists that investigate the relationship between the body and its surroundings.

The participating artists—Pablo Bronstein, Cao Fei, Jacqueline Doyen, İnci Eviner, Shaun Gladwell, Nina Saunders and Sans façon—lift methodologies and ideas from the worlds of choreography, dance and architecture and use these to explore how the environment affects our movements, habits and gestures. Many of the artists work across the boundaries of specific art forms to combine sculpture, installation, film, performance and dance. Furthermore, the exhibition as a whole seeks to play with the fluidity of time by presenting an array of works that reference multiple times and unfold at varying speeds. Within this remit video works provide a universe of possibilities for the body in motion and enable the audience to traverse multiple sites and times.

SHOW TIME is created specifically for the kunsthal Gl Holtegaard, located in an 18th century country house with a baroque garden. Many of the recurrent themes in the exhibition such as baroque notions of the body in movement and slippages in time are motivated by its unique location, while unlocking the potential of Gl Holtegaard as a site for contemporary art within a historical framework.

More info:

www.glholtegaard.dk

www.e-flux.com/announcements/show-time-choreography-in-contemporary-art/
Shadow Life, 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012
2012.01.25 - 2012.02.05

25 January - 5 February 2012

Cao Fei's newest video Shadow Life will be screened in the Tiger Awards Competition for Short Film, 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012.

more info:

http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/iffr-2012/programme/shorts/

Video Shadow Life: http://www.caofei.com/works.aspx?wtid=3
Arthouse at the Jones Center: Cao Fei's Shadow Life
2011.08.31 - 2011.10.30

Shadow Life, Cao’s most recent video, is an adaptation of traditional Chinese shadow puppetry. During the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279 CE), performances known as “large shadow shows” featured actors hidden behind the screen instead of puppets. The intricate hand puppets animating Shadow Life merge these traditional art forms to tell a distinctly contemporary story of modern China.

More info: http://www.arthousetexas.org/article/cao-fei/
Once Upon a Time, Deutsche Guggenheim
2011.08.07 - 2011.09.10

Based on important video artworks from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection, the exhibition Once Upon a Time investigates how contemporary artists adapt motives and narrative techniques from myths, fables, and fairy tales to mirror current social phenomena and events in recent history.... In Whose Utopia (2006) Cao examines the effects of capitalism on individual workers at the OSRAM China Lighting Ltd.

More info：http://www.deutsche-guggenheim-berlin.de/ex_onceuponatime_full.php
Intellectual Marathon in RMB City, Crystal Ball, De La Warr Pavilion, England
2012.08.11 - 2012.08.12

De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill On Sea (England)

Intellectual Marathon in RMB City, Cao Fei, 2012

"Crystal Ball" is a collection of single-channel videos by nine contemporary artists from around the globe commissioned by the IOC Olympics Media Art Collection Premiering at the De La Warr Pavilion. These new works reflect the values of Olympism through the prism of unique international perspectives.

Featured nine new media artists: Kota Ezawa, Cao Fei, Yeondoo Jung, Kimsooja, Torsten Lauschmann, Susan Pui San Lok, Emily Wardill and Hiraki Sawa. The works will be shown in special screenings with exhibition partners at AND Festival in Manchester, De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill and the Third Space Gallery in Belfast.

Sat 11 Aug 2012 - Sun 12 Aug 2012

Tickets: Free entry

De La Warr Pavilion

Marina

Bexhill On Sea (England)

East Sussex

more info:

http://www.dlwp.com/event/crystal-ball

http://festival.london2012.com/events/9000965250
The New York Observer －Serious Play: Cao Fei at Lombard-Freid
2011.06.21

By Will Heinrich 6/21 7:37pm

In the 19th century, Great Britain used gunboats to address its trade imbalance with China. It must have seemed clear enough who was doing what to whom. But in the 21st century, things are more complicated. The gunboats remain ready, but the more visible weapons—if they are weapons—have so far been children’s television characters. In “Play Time,” her fourth solo show at Lombard-Freid, the Cantonese, Beijing-based artist Cao Fei describes, with two videos, a small installation, and a series of photographs, whats being done. If she doesn’t make clear exactly who’s doing it, she does make clear just how unclear it is.

One video begins with a dump truck driving down a tree-lined avenue, past purple fields. Mounted over the truck’s grill is a huge image of Thomas the Tank Engine, the lead character of an animated program that was adapted for British television from a popular children’s book in the 1980s and has been showing in China since 2008. A gang of women clean and polish the windshield and fenders. When Thomas stops to let his driver ask for directions, children assemble. A small boy stares coolly through black sunglasses; an excited young mother tells her reticent son, “Point at the car and say Thomas.”

Thomas continues on to a construction site, where his driver changes a tire, and a gang of dusty workers fills him up with debris. A brief shot of Thomas’s patient, pensive, frowning face is the linchpin of the video: Thomas may be a cartoon train engine, but he knows what he’s doing.

And yet, he’s still a cartoon train engine, and that’s what makes everything so maddeningly fascinating. Cheery music begins to play as Thomas leaves the construction site and joins thousands of middle-class cars on a Beijing highway. He changes lanes. Other drivers smile. He passes the Bird’s Nest, the beautiful, futuristic stadium designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in consultation with currently-imprisoned Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei. When he stops for gas at a Sinopec station, we glimpse two different pairs of McDonald’s golden arches. More smiling fans. “Who is Thomas always together with?” an excited mother asks her bashful son; a little girl loudly declares, “Thomas isn’t often so upstanding.” The numbers on the pump flash rapidly as Thomas fills up with gas. Workers in matching blue uniforms crowd together for a picture.

On an even prettier tree-lined street, Thomas is stopped by a policeman, who angrily tells Thomas’s driver that trucks aren’t allowed there. “Hurry up and leave,” he says. The driver stops outside a cheap restaurant to lean against the fender with a styrofoam container of rice. A chef comes out to deliver a couple of skewers of meat. Then it’s time to drive again. Thomas’s very big day finally finishes when he arrives at an otherworldly brown landscape, with a mist-obscured stupa in the background, ready to dump his load, sleep a good night’s sleep, and do it all again the next day.

Things move quickly. Ms. Cao was introduced to Thomas the Tank Engine by her first son, who was born in 2009 and is already a fan. The video’s title, East Wind, is also a translation of the brand name of its truck, Dong Feng. Dong Feng was founded in 1969 as part of Mao’s deterrent strategy of building up an industrial base in Western China. “East wind,” said Mao, “prevails over west wind,” but the interesting thing about wind is that it’s not something you can ever quite put your finger on.

All in all, it’s nice to have a job, even if it means being posted abroad. But the plush CBeebies, descendants of the Teletubbies, represent the other side of the equation, having become displaced persons. The fourteen crisp and lovely c-prints of Ms. Cao’s PostGarden series follow them as they wander through the alternately lush and bleak landscapes of modern China. In Back to the Garden, Makka Pakka sprawls in a field of wildflowers with a guitar, while Igglebiggle and Upsy Daisy gaze into the future and the Tombliboos frolic behind. There’s a kind of shock of the real as you approach this photo, so silly and fantastical, and realize that you can make out individual purple blossoms around Makka Pakka’s white legs. In Twilight, Igglebiggle sprawls in the dirt of a misty, refuse-strewn forest, with Upsy Daisy, exhausted, lying across his legs.

The rest of the photos are arranged in pairs for a game of “spot the differences.” In After a Long Day, the CBeebies are wrapped in blankets, squatting under an elevated highway. In the left-hand photo, one of the Tombliboos has a rubber chicken on a stick; in the right-hand photo, he’s only got the stick. In Papa’s Funeral, Tombliboos hold Igglebiggle in a stretcher while Makka Pakka and Upsy Daisy dig a grave. Igglebiggle holds a red handkerchief that might be a flag in one version of the photo; in the other, it’s gone.

Play Time Fingerboard Park Installation is a tabletop wooden construction of denatured architectural signifiers. The “fingerboards,” little toy skateboards, are too big for the ramps, spirals, and ziggurats ostensibly designed for their pleasure. This is as silly as it is cerebral, as ironic as it is literal. It manages to be cheerful without being optimistic. In a way what Ms. Cao is saying is, “What can you say?” But if you live in 2011, you look at all of this, and you know what it means.

more info: http://www.observer.com/2011/06/serious-play-cao-fei-at-lombard-freid/
New York Critics' Picks: Cao Fei, ARTFORUM
2011.06.18

Text: Brian Droitcour

Your fingers can shred in Play Time (all works 2011), a sculpture by Cao Fei that shares its title with her fourth solo exhibition at Lombard Fried. Wooden models of monumental architecture—an obelisk, a classical pediment, ziggurats of varying shape—compose a cityscape. But they are obstacles next to the loops and ramps inviting viewers to push miniature skateboards around the sculpture. The video East Wind documents the journey of a truck wearing the face of Thomas the Tank Engine as it travels from a construction site, a zone of imminent future, to a junkyard, the burial grounds of the recent past. It’s shot in the countryside, far from the skyscrapers of Special Economic Zones. A brief video trilogy, Shadow Life, evokes folklore and communist festivals. The vignettes are performed by shadow puppets; the form of the hand is a synecdoche for the manual labor of workers and peasants, while the silhouette medium allows quick metamorphoses of a grandstanding dictator to a barking dog, a swaying tree to a crane transforming the landscape. A remake of a 2000 Russian pop hit serves as the sound track to the third part, Transmigration—a farcical rejoinder to Mao’s cover of Marxism-Leninism.

In her early work, Cao appraised the legacy of her father, a socialist realist sculptor who made images of the perfect society. She later turned to Second Life as a site for realizing the late-capitalist dream of near-instant return on investment. “Play Time” subtly fuses these directions of her work. Cao, unlike Ai Weiwei, does not bluntly say what the West expects to hear about China. Instead, she speaks as a witness to value systems shifting and struggling and ultimately dissolving in a global market that trades mostly in the intangible. From this stance she can show us the similarities between a system promising the attainment of paradise through labor and another where paradise can be purchased. The sweeping social experiments of the twentieth century, receding into history, shrink to toy scale. Ideology of any stripe looks as flimsy—and as vital—as a child’s play.

http://artforum.com/picks/section=nyc#picks28474
p.s. ARTFORUM "Critics' Picks" section, a select reviews of shows worldwide.