When Chinese contemporary artist Cao Fei was negotiating her solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ modern art wing, Naala Badu, she was adamant it would not be a traditional “low-lit in a white square box” endeavour.
The Guangzhou-born artist, who has strong ties to Sydney (a sister city to the sprawling Chinese port city), wanted her show to capture the brashness and bustle of a busy mall or market.
Consequently, in Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆, gallery walls are forsaken for scaffolding while music and sound effects from her various installations – a theatre, a restaurant, a factory – bleed into each other, competing for the viewer’s attention.
“It’s not a criticism of the European [style], but normally we see a lot of video shows [installed] in a white cube … and you see the curator turning down the volume – more quiet or more clean,” Cao told Guardian Australia.
“But I want my exhibition to reflect my personality and experience. In my city there is always lots of construction, a lot of demolition and rebuilding. This is my material.”
My City is Yours is the Beijing-based artist’s first major solo exhibition in Australia, with key works from a 20-year career that spans film, photography, metaverse experiments and large-scale interactive installations spread across the AGNSW and Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Much of Cao’s career has been spent examining the phenomenal technological and social transformations that have taken place in China over the past quarter century. She has staged solo exhibitions in Beijing, London, Paris and New York, and last year made the top 10 of ArtReview’s Power 100 list, where she was described as “a leading figure in envisioning our metaverse-tinged future”.
Visitors to the AGNSW enter the exhibition through a time capsule: the Hongxia Theatre, a cinema that was built in Beijing in the 1960s. For six years, until it was demolished in 2021, Cao rented the real Hongxia Theatre as her studio space.
Passing through the formal mahogany reception desk decorated with lurid plastic flowers and surrounded by fading wallpaper, the viewer enters a compact auditorium where a dozen or so spartan seats, taken from the original theatre, face a screen playing Cao’s 2019 feature film Nova, a sci-fi tale about a computer scientist whose son get trapped in cyberspace after an experiment goes horribly wrong. The boy has 40 years to find his way back – 40 years also being the length of China’s post-socialist transition.
Wormholes and time travel are recurring themes for Cao, whose desire to “escape the timeline and just swim across it” is reflected in this installation, with sand appearing to cascade from the screen, transforming the auditorium floor into a beach.
Another time capsule will provoke nostalgia in many Sydneysiders: Cao has recreated part of the grand dining room of the Marigold, the much-loved Chinatown restaurant that closed during Covid-19. Cao salvaged some of the expansive round white linen-draped tables, deep red and gold bling furnishings and dim-sum trolleys from the yum cha palace, to recreate it a year later.
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Goodbye, Marigold! is one of three Sydney-specific installations in the exhibition. In her ongoing series Hip Hop, Cao captures locals at play in Chinese communities across multiple cities; in turn, the AGNSW commissioned Hip Hop Sydney, which features more than 60 Chinese Sydneysiders aged between nine and 90, dancing to the music of local Korean-Australian musicians 1300.
The artist’s fascination with music video culture can be traced back to her childhood in Guangzhou. Cao has written about growing up “in the first mainland city to open up to the world” in the 1990s, as “pop culture gradually infiltrat[ed]” China.
“I spent my entire adolescence captive to music-video culture, as well as to Hollywood movies, western television programs, and so on,” she wrote, in an essay for Artforum. “These media were an explosive cultural stimulus for my generation in China. I fell in love with MTV for a time, imitating the dances and fashions I saw in the videos. I would listen to pop music on my Walkman on the way to and from school, and the fruits of my diligent study were obvious every time I hit the dance floor. I even danced in some local television advertisements.”
Cao dials down the volume for a shrine-like corner dedicated to her sister, Cao Xiaoyun, also an artist and a long-time resident of Sydney until she died of cancer at the age of 50 in 2022. Golden Wattle features archival material, family photographs and artworks painted by Xiaoyun; it takes its title from Xiaoyun’s love of Australia’s national flower, with its vibrant greens and golds.
Mounted on the wall as part of the work is a four-page letter, written in Mandarin and translated into English, that Cao sent to her sister from Beijing shortly after her death.
“Influenced by our parents, we all studied art, but you are more like an ‘artist’ than Cao Dan [Cao’s other sibling] and me,” Cao writes. “You were never bound by material life, and only listen to the call of your heart.”
“My sister never had a show in Sydney,” Cao tells Guardian Australia. “I think of it as a gift for her, even if she can’t see it.”
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Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆 is on at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 13 April 2025
