APRIL 7, 2015 6:00 PM April 7, 2015 6:00 pm
The artist Cao Fei at home in Beijing.Credit Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
Cao Fei was still a student at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2000 when she was discovered by the curator Hou Hanru, who introduced her to the international art world. Since then, Ms. Cao, 36, who is best known for her multimedia and video work, has exhibited widely, including at the Venice Biennale, the Serpentine Galleries in London, and the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2010 and won the 2006 Chinese Contemporary Art Award in the best young artist category.
A constant theme in Ms. Cao’s work is the interplay between the real and imagined world in fast-changing China. In “COSPlayers” (2004), she followed young Chinese dressed as Japanese manga and anime characters as they rollicked around the intensely real city of Guangzhou, her hometown. For “RMB City” (2007), Ms. Cao, under the avatar China Tracy, spent several years developing a virtual city in the online role-playing game Second Life, combining “overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country’s future.” The result is a colorful playground of floating Mao statues, an upside-down China Central Television Headquarters building and aerial shopping malls. For a project commissioned by Siemens, she spent six months at a lighting manufacturing plant and produced “Whose Utopia?” (2006), a video work in which workers role-play their fantasies — dancing or playing guitar — within the humdrum factory environment.
In 2006, Ms. Cao moved to Beijing where she lives with her husband, the Singaporean artist Lim Tzay Chuen, and their two children. Her most recent work includes “Haze and Fog” (2013), a zombie video set in Beijing that explores the spiritual malaise that has come with China’s pursuit of urban modernity, as well as “La Town” (2014), a video that features model figures and plastic buildings in an imagined post-apocalyptic metropolis. “La Town” will be featured at the main show of the Venice Biennale in May. In an interview, Ms. Cao reflected on her career, censorship and motherhood.
Q.
You have been active in the art world now for about 15 years. How do you keep your work fresh?
A.
I think the few years when I took a break to have children were very important. Before that, from 2000 to when I began “RMB City” in 2007, everything was happening very quickly. There was this demand for a “new, new human being” as the curator Hou Hanru says, this demand for young artists to represent the “New China.” I felt like a lot of people were pushing me into this role. But once I had children, it was kind of like a bubble popped. After I had children and before I made “Haze and Fog,” I went through a kind of cleansing. Now that I’m in my 30s, I’m no longer a young artist.
Q.
Why did you move to Beijing?
A.
The biggest reason was because the landlady of my previous studio in Guangzhou, where I had been for three years, decided to sell the building. Since we had to change our studio anyway, we decided to give Beijing a try.
The fact that Beijing was a sort of hub for artists wasn’t that important to me. A lot of artists come to Beijing because they want more exposure and more opportunities. But I had already had a lot of big exhibitions, so I didn’t really need the platform Beijing offered. Actually, shortly after I came to Beijing, I had children and my personal life became my priority.
In the beginning I felt like I couldn’t connect to the city. A lot of artists from southern China have that feeling when they come here. Take, for example, my husband, who is a Singaporean artist. For him to come here, the whole history and context is different. It’s not that easy.
When I did the Siemens factory project in Guangzhou, I felt very in tune with my surroundings. But in Beijing, there’s a very strong sense of the city being the capital. It’s very political, it’s not very human centered and the city is inconvenient. So “RMB City” for me was in some ways an escape from this. I was creating this floating fictional city.
After I had children, I slowly began to feel like I had connected and then I made “Haze and Fog.” After seeing that, some critics who were familiar with my work said the film wouldn’t have had the same feeling if I had made it in the south. The coldness of the north, the ultra-sterile environment — you can only capture that feeling in Beijing.
