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Asia

Cao Fei
RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 04

2007
RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 04
RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 04

Since 2007, Cao Feihas radically focused her work on Second Life, an online space that virtually mimics ‘the real world’ and includes everything from the expression of ideas to economic investment. In the body of work titled RMB City Cao Fei creates a virtual city through the platform Second Life as a vehicle to express ideas that relate to modernization, capitalism, and consumer culture. One aspect of this project, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 04 is part of a larger series of prints featuring digitally composed images from Cao’s video work of the same name. Referring to China’s modernization and its capitalist and utopian visions, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 04 explores the ways in which global communication impacts imagination, values, and ways of life. For Cao, the digital world is an expression of our human condition, and as such, an avenue to reflect on these emerging forms of social consciousness. By appropriating virtual reality, Cao opens up a new frontier in the field of art production that surpasses conventional materiality and invites collaboration and exchanges with her public and clients.

Cao Fei is a multimedia artist known for works that focus on the interplay between real and fictional worlds. Working across photography, performance, video, and digital media, her practice vividly reflects the zeitgeist of the late 20th century and the role that image production plays in shaping youth culture in a digital era. Influenced by an array of forms of global pop culture — from Cantonese Pop and Japanese anime to American hip-hop — a common thread in Cao’s practice is the merging of everyday life with new forms of technology as a means to unveil society's unfulfilled desires. Her pivotal film Whose Utopia showcases assembly line workers in a factory in China as they act out their aspirations in a backdrop of industrial machinery. Through constructed worlds, Fei presents a profound meditation on the boundaries between the real and the fantastic and the sense of alienation that drives new generations to increasingly experience the world behind the veneer of their avatars.
Biography
Cao Fei
Born 1978, China
Details
120 x 160 cm
C-print
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