Cao Fei builds beautiful nightmares. In an imaginary city gripped by apocalyptic transformation, a school band blows a silent march; a boy on a camel surveys acres of destruction from his hilltop perch; a dying squid leaks blood all over an abandoned factory floor. Guangzhou, the artist’s real home town, also becomes a forum of fantasy. Equipped with a camera and a gothic sensibility, she navigates the city’s wasted edges, its huge apartment complexes, and dramatically reconfigured landscapes. She wades into ugliness and emerges with dystopic trophies.
The 37-year-old artist commands a pithy and profound retrospective at PS1, a distillation of her still-evolving career. Born just after the Cultural Revolution, Cao Fei is the daughter of the realist sculptor Cao Chong’en, who famously glorified Communist heroes like Deng Xiaoping in bronze. His best-known work is a monument of Bruce Lee that presides over Hong Kong’s harbour. Cao Fei has adapted her father’s realism and fondness for icons. In place of his obligatory optimism, she offers scorching assessments of contemporary China, shot through with wistfulness. Mining pop culture’s techno vein, she inserts avatars, zombies and anime characters into artworks that mingle romanticism and dejection.
Her most touching work, the video “Whose Utopia?” came out of a six-month residency at the Osram lighting factory in Foshan, sponsored by the Siemens Art Program. Cao began her tenure by polling employees. “How do you feel about the factory?” she asked in a lengthy questionnaire. “Why did you leave your home and go to the [Pearl] river delta?” What do you hope to achieve in the future?” The answers gave Cao a way to measure the distance between her subjects’ dreams and the lives they actually lead. She zoomed by stages into her subjects’ imaginations, lingering on the workplace, then the work and finally the workers themselves.