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CAO FEI ::::
born in 1978, Guangzhou, China
lives in Guangzhou and Beijing
China’s current modernization process is fundamentally a utopian project. it can be understood as a kind of “ideal” combination of the most energetic imaginative, but unnecessarily positive aspects of socialist (communist social mobilization) and capitalist (consumerist market domination) modes of production and development. A transnational joint-venture like siemens implanted in Fuoshan, a southern city of China, is a typical example of such an adventure. It’s somehow experimental to test out the possibility of generating a “third way” of economic and social organization beyond the dichotomy of communism vs. capitalism. It may help construct a different type of social system. this evokes a lot of dreams and hopes for those who are involved, especially the workers who are directly struggling on the front. However, what kind of dreams, hopes, and utopias can those surviving on the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy have for themselves? this is the very question that Cao Fei intends to ask and reveal to the public gaze in What Are You Doing Here?—a project that unfolded in the heart of the Siemens factory. Using various approaches and media, she exposes, in a highly complex and multilayered way, the intense space that the workers negotiate out of their restricted working environment for their imagination, emotion, and dreams, in order to turn themselves, for once, into artists.
A woman artist from Guangzhou, China, Cao Fei works with a number of multimedia languages—video, theater, performance, and photography— to manifest the intensive lifestyle of a new generation of chinese youth who navigate between a rapidly mutating reality and a fantastic world leading to more freedom and playfulness. in her recent work, she shows a significant shift of focus, a shift that commits her to a more “realistic” inquiry into the social conflicts and contradictions of a Chinese society in transition.
Cao Fei’s What Are You Doing Here? is presented in collaboration with the Orange county museum of Art, Newport Beach, California and supported by Lombard-Fried Projects, new York.
Visit Cao Fei's blog
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