Museums, Basel
Cao Fei
Testimonies to the Near Future
Kunstmuseum Basel | GegenwartTickets available at tinyurl.com/sksyyt7d The Chinese artist Cao Fei (b. 1978, Guangzhou, lives in Beijing) is one of the defining voices of her generation, working across video, digital media, photography, installation, and sculpture. The artist's works capture the rapid changes that have shaped China, and the Pearl River Delta in particular, since the country's 1978 policy of Reform and Opening up. For Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future, her first solo exhibition in Switzerland and largest survey exhibition in Europe to date, the artist transforms the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart into a total work of art that takes the form of a city blending immersive installations and video universes from her oeuvre of the past thirty years. Cao Fei's achievement as a pioneering creator of digital worlds is uncontested. Her early works have influenced an entire generation of artists from Asia and beyond. For over two decades, she has made art—from video installations and digital simulations to virtual-reality settings—grappling with the impact on human life of wrenching societal and technological transformations, establishing her renown as a leading thinker about art, media, technology, and the future. Her videos and partly game-based environments are situated in factories, dreamscapes, and visions of a future. Exploring aspects of work, change, and the peculiar beauty of a globalized world, they address questions of identity, embodiment, and recollection. Cao Fei examines how economic growth, technological development, and globalization influence our society, without ever descending into pessimism about the future. Among the centerpieces of the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart are seminal works like Whose Utopia (2006), RMB City (2007–), Asia One (2018), Nova (2019–), Oz (2022), and the Hip Hop series (2003–). Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Cao Fei's art is her gift for integrating speculative and surreal elements into works that are often almost documentary. This aspect is underscored by elaborate installations that materialize elements from the videos in the exhibition space, further blurring the boundary between the physical and virtual realms. The exhibition, which extends across all four floors of the Gegenwart building, invites viewers to delve deep into Cao Fei's extensive oeuvre and makes for a singular experience in three dimensions in which the video works are not just on display but become an immersive reality. The exhibition is designed by Cao Fei in collaboration with Small Production, Beijing.