29/11/24 — 17/02/25
Opening: Thursday, November 28, 7:00 p.m.
Gallery 5. Level 2
With a career that spans more than twenty years of production, Cao Fei (Guangzhou, China, 1978) is considered one of the most important artists in her native country and the international contemporary art circuit. By carrying out diverse research that explores different mediums and supports, the artist is interested in how the rapid social changes that are taking place in the 21st century are reflected in our subjectivities, mostly permeated by our intense use of technology. Her starting point is the major urban transformations that China has witnessed in recent decades and the technological revolution the country is going through.
This exhibition—produced by the Pinacoteca de São Paulo—presents Cao Fei’s research in a generous selection that ranges from her early work to her latest production, all of it arranged around four themes: “Manufacturing and globalization,” “Past and present in the virtual world,” “Memories of socialism and science fiction,” and “Urbanization and dystopia.” This broad scope will allow visitors to see her critical use of different platforms and technologies: from Second Life, a three-dimensional interactive virtual environment that was highly successful in the 2000s, to the metaverse.
While video is the artist’s most prominent medium of expression, the exhibition space has been transformed into immersive installations, with the presence of objects that make our imaginations of the past and the future intertwine. Elements from her films are on display in the gallery as if they had burst out of the screen, inviting us to play with the boundaries between reality and fiction.
As we walk through the exhibition, we dive into the fundamental questions that shape the artist’s research: How has human experience been transformed with the development of artificial intelligence? What has changed in the construction of our identity in the midst of so many virtual possibilities? Do we dream digitally?
In this exhibition we do not find crystal-clear answers, but rather sophisticated elaborations that reveal the level of ambiguity present in the current relationships between the living, the non-living, the post-human, the cyborg and other genera, transcending binary categories and boundaries.
Organized by the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
Curator: Pollyana Quintella.
Catalogue
This catalog accompanies the first comprehensive exhibition of Cao Fei's work in Latin America, produced by the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. It features a selection of images from nine projects comprising nearly thirty works, most of them video installations, created from the early 2000s to the present. In her curatorial essay, Pollyana Quintella situates Cao Fei's work in the context of contemporary China and reviews the main projects in the exhibition, organized into four thematic sections: “Past and Present of the Virtual World,” “Manufacturing and Globalization,” “Memories of Socialism and Sci-Fi,” and “Dystopia and Urbanization.” Brazilian semiologist and researcher Marcela Vieira focuses on the utopian aspects of her projects, which emphasize the contradictions of the present, and in a text specially commissioned for this edition, Argentine art historian Lucía de Francesco, a specialist in Asian cultures, traces the instances of Chinese immigration in Argentina and the inscription of this community in local society.
Guided Tours
Wednesdays and Saturdays, 5 p.m.
Included with museum admission ticket.
Dossier
Download dossier of the exhibition (PDF) →
Cao Fei
Guangzhou, China, 1978
She is a renowned contemporary artist currently living in Beijing. Her work combines social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to surrealism, and documentary conventions in her films and installations. Her works reflect the rapid transformations taking place in Chinese society today.
Her works have been exhibited at numerous international biennials and triennials, including the Shanghai Biennial (2004), the Moscow Biennial (2005), the Taipei Biennial (2006), the 15th and 17th Sydney Biennials (2006 and 2010), the Istanbul Biennial (2007), the Yokohama Triennial (2008), the 50th, 52nd, and 56th Venice Biennale (2003, 2007, and 2015), the Aichi Triennial (2022), and the Sharjah Biennial (2023).
Cao Fei's major projects in recent years include a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York (2016), a solo exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2018), a retrospective at K21 Düsseldorf (2018), a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019), and a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries, London (2020). Recent projects include a major retrospective at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2021), and solo exhibitions at MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome (2021), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022), Pinacoteca Contemporânea, São Paulo (2023), SCAD Museum of Art (2024), Lenbachhaus in Munich (2024), and Pudong Art Museum, Shanghai (2024).
She has been awarded the SCAD deFINE ART Prize (2024) and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2021). She was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize and the Future Generation Art Prize in 2010, and was awarded “Best Young Artist” and “Best Artist” at the China Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) in 2006 and 2016, respectively.
