Cao Fei | Testimonies to the Near Future

With the imposing retrospective of the Chinese artist Cao Fei at Kunstmuseum Gegenwart Basel, we dive into the infrastructure of a country of workers. It is not without criticism that the artist addresses issues such as labour exploitation and automation, unchecked urbanisation, and the alienation generated by market socialism made in China (see, for example, the section “The Factories” in the Basel exhibition).

However, we are far from Wang Bing’s radical immersive aesthetics or the frontal confrontations of Ai Weiwei. Cao Fei’s approach is both simple and subtle. It recalls the seemingly non-judgemental stance of observational documentary – apparently not at odds with the aesthetic imperatives of socialist realism – yet at the same time she systematically foregrounds the most fictional aspects of reality. Realism – or rather, a certain ideology of realism that celebrates ordinary people and normative life – is dismantled from within, allowing the sometimes absurd fictionality of fantasy and technology to unfold.

Cao Fei enters technology through play. The playful figure of the Chinese bon enfant appears to sublimate the Chinese worker, yet the two ultimately reveal the same dynamics of submission. After all, dumbing down has long been one of the most effective instruments of social control. This lends even the most humourous moments in her work a bittersweet quality. The seemingly joyful participation of workers and ordinary people in the fictional situations of hyper-technological modernity conveys a sense of liberation and emancipation, together with the unsettling impression of being caught in an elaborate illusion. Behind a (filmic) world of props, smiles gradually reveal the loneliness of the masks.

Not only the optimism of the Chinese people is at stake here, but also Cao Fei’s own possible optimism. Through her work, one could argue that she embraced the emergence of digital technology with the enthusiasm of a pioneer – which she indeed was. Seen from the perspective of her avatar China Tracy, works such as RMB City (2007–2011) and i.Mirror (2007) appear almost uncritical today, while at the same time functioning as remarkable documents of the early history of digitalisation. Is this why, in the Basel exhibition, they are “balanced” by the highly critical Rumba II: Nomad (2015) in the section “The Office”? Does Cao Fei make certain concessions to accelerationism – that optimistic belief in technology as a universal solution, one that paradoxically makes the acknowledgement of existing problems all the easier?

Leaving this extensive Basel retrospective, which spans three decades of work, one is left with a remarkably balanced mixture of alarming criticism and playful optimism. This can be read either as a virtue – the virtue of complexity – or as a vice – the vice of duplicity. I tend to value ambiguity as a productive source of criticism. I would even venture to trace a slight shift in Cao Fei’s work dating from the mid-2010s (perhaps under the influence of a changing political climate in China?). In a film such as La Town (2014), the futuristic line is no longer interwoven with the dystopian one; rather, the latter clearly prevails, leaving aside the more optimistic register. At the same time, through its celebration of the scale model and its exposure of cinema’s animation core by means of stop-motion, this work foregrounds the fictional essence of cinema itself, decisively breaking with the realist tradition. More recently, in the remarkable Isle of Instability (2020–2023), Cao Fei’s use of playfulness is closely tied to boredom and a form of existential nihilism shaped by technology itself. Little optimism remains.

Regardless of the technology or social system under consideration, Cao Fei explores its structures and infrastructures, as if every human situation were ultimately governed by infrastructure as its hidden motor.

In any case, the Basel exhibition is organised thematically rather than chronologically. This allows us to experience the strange trans-temporality of her artistic corpus, where older digital works are unexpectedly interwoven with our contemporary technological landscape. The hip-hop project (2003–2025) that welcomes visitors to Kunstmuseum Gegenwart explicitly stages this suspended temporality, in which temporal differences become almost incidental. (An exception is the 2022 work MatrioshkaVerse and its ostentatious celebration of Chinese-Russian trade cooperation, which, despite its critical disenchantment, today carries a sinister geopolitical resonance.)

One element contributing to this sense of temporal vagueness in her fantastic, dystopian and visionary worlds is probably the defining feature of Cao Fei’s oeuvre: her obsession with infrastructure. Regardless of the technology or social system under consideration, Cao Fei explores its structures and infrastructures, as if every human situation were ultimately governed by infrastructure as its hidden motor.

This makes her films and installations highly sensitive to the spatial dimension, whose constraining aspects she consistently foregrounds. Space is always a space of constraints in Cao Fei’s worlds, even when freedom is openly “performed”, as in her immersive installation DUOTOPIA (2022, 2024). In this respect, the spatial organisation of the exhibition at Kunstmuseum Gegenwart is less compelling than the spaces created by the filmic works themselves, since the exhibition design remains primarily didactic rather than immersive. Within the museum, the displayed objects function mainly as symptoms or references to ideas, rather than as experiential elements in their own right.

The pair freedom–constraint echoes the pair visionary–deceptive. This provides a key to understanding a constant throughout Cao Fei’s work: the centrality of gesture. The inspiring section “Artist’s Archive (1995–2005)”, which gathers the first ten years of her work as a video artist, confirms this emphasis on movement and gesture. Beginning with The Little Spark (1995), and throughout all the videos presented in this section, the body and choreography emerge as her most urgent concerns. On closer inspection, the movements and gestures of the protagonists across her entire oeuvre are always free, but only within the framework of specific constraints. More precisely, as becomes particularly clear in the context of labour, gestures are “operationalised” – they become procedural – even when they appear in colourful, artificial and fantastical forms. The visionary thus becomes the deceptive surface of the ruling infrastructure.