Cao Fei transforms the Art Gallery of NSW into a futuristic cyber city in her first Australian retrospective
‘No young artist has a sharper view of the future than Cao Fei’ – The New York Times
Leading Chinese contemporary artist Cao Fei brings the buzzing energy of the city to the Art Gallery of New South Wales this summer for the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Australia. Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆, is a Sydney-exclusive exhibition staged as part of the Sydney International Art Series 2024–25, featuring key works from the artist’s 30-year career, including the premiere of two new commissions.
Voted by ArtReview magazine in 2023 as one of the art world’s 10 most influential people, Cao Fei has documented China’s rapid urbanisation, globalisation and digital revolution for more than two decades, interpreting the energy of the contemporary metropolis in mesmerising films, photography and large-scale interactive and immersive installations.
Spanning the Ainsworth Family Gallery’s 1300-square-metre space in the Art Gallery’s Naala Badu building, Cao’s exhibition explores China’s rapid urban, technological and social transformations from the Y2K period to today. Designed by the artist and Hong Kong’s Beau Architects, the exhibition takes the form of a cityscape. Divided into a series of civic zones – a central plaza, a theatre, a restaurant, a factory and a haven for spiritual contemplation – the exhibition’s design is inspired by China’s recent urban transformation.
My City is Yours examines two main themes that have preoccupied the artist’s practice since the beginning of her career: the city and technology. The exhibition brings together key works from the late 1990s to today, including early portraits of cosplayers and street dancers shot on DV-camcorder to pioneering net art, photography, videogames, virtual reality and immersive installations
Exhibition highlights include Cosplayers 2004, one of her most renowned video works that captures the imaginative identities of China’s younger generation of cosplayers; RMB City 2007–11, an ambitious art project that saw Cao build a virtual metropolis with a running economy, manifesto and mayor on the online platform Second Life; and Nova 2019, a feature-length, retro-futurist film that tells the story of a computer scientist’s attempt to turn humans into digital matter. Super delivery: Sydney 2024 will be displayed for the duration of the exhibition on the monumental screen that overlooks the Aqualand Atrium in Naala Badu.
The exhibition will also debut three major Sydney-specific works. One of the exhibition’s zones pays homage to the iconic, now-closed Sydney yum cha restaurant, the Marigold. Visitors will exit the exhibition through an installation inspired by the restaurant’s 1990s Canto-decor, including salvaged red carpet and dim-sum trolleys from the former venue, in a setting that highlights the importance of such places in the cultural memory of the city for the local Chinese diaspora.
Screened within the exhibition is a new music video, Hip hop: Sydney 2024, featuring local artists, aunties, chefs and shopkeepers performing hip-hop moves to new music by Korean–Australian musicians 1300. Filmed in more than 20 locations across Sydney’s Haymarket and Burwood Chinatowns with a cast of over 60 community members – from Benjamin Law and Claudia Chan Shaw to young cosplayers and 86-year-old George Wing Kee – this new work is the latest instalment in a series of videos that the artist has shot around the world, from Guangzhou to New York.
A further highlight in the exhibition is a special new project titled Golden wattle 2024. The installation is dedicated to Cao’s late sister Cao Xiaoyun (1971–2022), an artist who migrated from Guangzhou to Sydney in the late 1990s and had a particular fondness for the golden wattle (Acacia pycnantha), Australia’s national flower. This deeply personal work uses archival materials, family photographs and artworks to explore one individual’s diasporic journey.
Cao Fei: My City is Yours is supported by the NSW Government through its tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW.
Minister for the Arts, Music and the Night-time Economy, and Minister for Jobs and Tourism John Graham said: ‘Cao Fei is one of the most innovative artists working today. I’m pleased that our culture lovers will be able to immerse themselves in the work of this incredible Chinese artist in Sydney this summer.
‘The three exhibitions in the Sydney International Art Series 2024–25 program reflect our ambition to ensure Sydney is a global cultural hub where art and creativity is celebrated – a place where locals and visitors can experience the most exciting cultural offerings from around Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and the world,’ said Minister Graham.
Art Gallery of New South Wales director Michael Brand said: ‘This exhibition continues the Art Gallery’s long engagement with Chinese art, which began in the 1890s. Cao Fei’s connection to Sydney is multilayered. Sydney is the official sister city of her hometown, Guangzhou, and it is also the place her late sister, Cao Xiaoyun, called home for many years.
‘Known for her compelling storytelling, Cao is one of the most prolific and globally influential contemporary Chinese artists working today and she remains at the forefront of new media. The Art Gallery’s exhibition will be unlike anything our visitors have experienced before – Cao’s unique blend of virtual worlds and cutting-edge technology creates playful and inventive multimedia installations that will transport visitors into her world.’
The exhibition is co-curated by Art Gallery of New South Wales curator of film, Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd, and curator of Chinese art, Yin Cao, who have worked closely with the artist to develop the exhibition.
‘Cao Fei is a worldbuilder, a chronicler, a keen witness to her historical era. Since the late 1990s, she has documented the rapid changes in China through video, photography, sculpture and expanded installations. Always at the forefront of experimenting with new media, Cao’s universe is an artistic one where time is out of joint, reality slips into fantasy, people tap in and out of virtual realms, and radical, disjunctive upheavals are an everyday fact of life,’ said Arrowsmith-Todd.
‘Cao Fei finds inspiration from her surroundings and applies a unique, subtle, lively and humorous approach to show how ordinary people cope with the changes brought about urbanisation and technological developments in their lives,’ added Yin Cao.
Cao Fei, photo: Jin Jiaji
Born in Guangzhou in 1978, Cao Fei now lives and works in Beijing. Her solo exhibitions have been held at venues including the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2021); Serpentine Galleries, London (2020); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); MoMA PS1, New York (2016); and Tate Modern, London (2013). Cao’s work has been featured in group exhibitions and major biennial and triennial exhibitions worldwide since the early 2000s, including Aichi, Istanbul, Moscow, Shanghai, Sharjah, Sydney, Taipei, Venice and Yokohama.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication designed by Sydney-based artist and graphic designer Evi O that captures the playfulness of Cao Fei’s art. The publication features reproductions of key works and new writing from contributors including the exhibition co-curators Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd and Yin Cao, as well as renowned scholar of Chinese contemporary art Hou Hanru and Asian–Australian writers Michael Sun and Pao-chen Tang.
Cao Fei: My City is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆 is exclusively on show at the Art Gallery from 30 November 2024 to 13 April 2025. A Gallery Pass providing entry to Cao Fei and Magritte exhibitions at the Art Gallery is available, as well as an Art Pass, which additionally grants entry to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia exhibition Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory.
The Sydney International Art Series is a NSW Government initiative through its tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW, in collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, to bring the world’s most outstanding international artists and their works exclusively to Sydney.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales acknowledges the traditional custodians of the Country on which it is located, the Gadigal of the Eora nation, and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. From its magnificent site in Sydney, the Art Gallery is one of Australia’s pre-eminent art museums and the state’s leading visual arts institution. Its mission is to serve the widest possible audience as a centre of excellence for the collection, preservation, documentation, interpretation and display of Australian and international art, and a forum for scholarship, art education and the exchange of ideas. The transformation of the Art Gallery – now with two buildings, Naala Badu and Naala Nura, brings together art, architecture and landscape in spectacular new ways with dynamic galleries and seamless connections between indoor and outdoor spaces. Naala Badu is the most significant cultural development to open in Sydney in half a century and is a prominent new destination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and culture.
