Cao Fei’s Science Fiction Fever Dreams

By Sanjana Varghese

Throughout her wide ranging career, Cao Fei has approached now familiar themes — alienation from our labor, cyber purgatory, gentrification —  with an intimate lens, focusing on how technology and market forces reshape the rhythms of daily life. There’s a knowing wink with her bite, something surreal about her magical versions of the present.

Blueprints, her first solo exhibition in the UK at Serpentine Galleries, leads to an uneasy balancing act, with visitors sliding between feature-length films, VR experiences, and archival research displayed in vitrines. Cao succeeds in creating something like a film set through a series of site specific installations: an AR experience (“The Eternal Wave,” 2020) that mimics her studio’s kitchen , and a completely dark room where her feature length film Nova (2019), about an international science experiment gone wrong, plays on loop.

Installation view of Cao Fei, Blueprints, Serpentine Galleries, London (image courtesy Serpentine Galleries; photo by Gautier Deblonde)

When Cao’s studio was demolished in 2015, she moved to a new space in the former Hongxia Theater, or “HX” project as it is now called — the lobby of which is duly recreated in the first room of Blueprints, from the mint walls down to the deep red velvet curtain. The Hong Xia Theatre was a community space, town hall, discotheque, and canteen, the social hub of the Jiuxianqiao (‘Hong Xia’) district. This district is where some of the first computers in China were made, and vitrines dotted around the gallery display textbooks and newsletters from the time. They house pamphlets, photos, and even a book of admission tokens from the theater, a mini archive attempting a recreation of the real thing. A documentary in which Cao interviews urban historians and people from the area about how rapidly Hong Xia is changing  plays on an ATM replica, tucked away in the corner. This part of the exhibition feels more ethnographic;  and Cao is almost sociological in her considered approach to the people still living in the Hong Xia district, and what residue they may leave behind...READ MORE