Shadow Life (3'14" excerpt)

2011 / video / 10mins

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.

       
         —— ARTFORUM - New York Reviews: Cao Fei by Brian Droitcour, June 2011.