Hans Ulrich Obrist on Why Cao Fei Leads China’s “Postmedium” Generation
March 31, 2016
Artist Cao Fei's A Mirage from COSPlayers Series, 2004
As part of a generation of young Chinese artists coming to terms with the many paradoxes of China in the 21st century, Cao Fei has turned to pop culture and mass media as the basis for her wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach. The results speak for themselves; her videos and multimedia projects have been shown everywhere from her native Guangzhou to the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim, and she’s become one of the most coveted contemporary Chinese artists in the international auction circuit.
In anticipation of her upcoming solo show at MoMA PS1 (the Chinese artist’s first in the U.S., opening Friday, April 3), we turn to an essay by Hans Ulrich Obrist from Phaidon’s Defining Contemporary Art, in which the curatorial superstar points to Cao’s fantastical 2004 series COSPlayers as a prime example of her groundbreaking “postmedium” practice.
Indeed, the rapidly changing landscape of Guangzhou itself has been a continual backdrop—a nexus even—for Cao’s work. As the urban fabric undergoes dynamic structural changes, she uses the city itself as a device for organizing her interdisciplinary activities. Of the artist’s video works, the eight-minute long COSPlayers has performed perhaps the most effective and wide-ranging synthesis of her concerns. Together with a related series of photographs, the work presents both a critical and spectacular picture of contemporary reality, using pop culture as a bridge rather than as a simple reference point in the orgy of appropriation and revival that characterizes our historical moment.
Cao Fei, Golden Fighter's Despair, 2004Though rooted in daily life, Cao’s work evokes countless possibilities for social transformation. Since the production of COSPlayers, the artist’s activities have ranged from her continuing co-organization of the Da Zha Lan Project—a research initiative undertaken by a loose artistic collective that documents the encroachments of modernity on residents of one of Beijing’s poorest areas—to her more recent turn, in the ongoing project RMB City, inaugurated in 2008, towards the online world of Second Life and its possibilities for creating and inhabiting a virtual reality. This invented metropolis continues to spawn new districts (and side projects such as the film she made about its making, 2009’s The Birth of RMB City). Extending the concerns of COSPlayers, and especially its collision of documentary and fantasy, RMB City’s picture of accelerated transformation in China imagines not only the future of urban change but also the future of art in a world increasingly mediated by virtual experience.
