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Cao Fei (born 1978, 曹斐) is a Chinese multimedia artist, born in Guangzhou, China. Cao’s work includes video and digital media that reveals the culture and daily life of Chinese citizens born after the Cultural Revolution. Cao has captured the fast transformation of contemporary China spotlighting the mixture of foreign influences from America and Japan, through her projects.

Career
Cao's works explore her generation’s experience of the chaotic economic and social changes in China. She talks about the solitude and impotence that her generation faces in conjunction with its strong desire for a utopia.

Cao received her B.F.A from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2001.During her college years, Cao presented her first performance work, The Little Spark (1998), shown in the affiliated Middle School of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. She then created her first film, Imbalance 257 (1999), which analyzed the tendency of her generation to break the boundaries of existing societal norms and truths. A year later, Cao produced another video work, Chain Reaction (2000), which she explained as “a view of schizophrenia” and analyzed the power of evil existing inside human nature.

After she graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2001, she produced several notable pieces including the two-minute video, Burners (2003), which focuses on human desire. She explains that it surfaces the existence of privacy in soft porn and mocks the idea of male egocentricity.

Cao then turned her focus towards the modern paradox of China’s rapid economic growth and social marginalization by producing video works such as San Yuan Li 三元里 (2003), shot in a village surrounded by Guangzhou skyscrapers. Scenes include people maintaining the traditional lifestyles tied to farming, producing traditional crafts, tending rice paddies, and raising livestock. This work was commissioned by and shown at the Venice Biennale in 2013. .

Her 2004 video Cosplayers, one of Cao’s most well-known works, Chinese teenagers are dressed in anime costumes and act out their fantasies of the virtual characters against the industrial landscape of Guangzhou. Cao's fascination with the Internet and its power to create the subcultures across the country has lent influence to this project.

In 2006, Cao produced her Hip Hop series (2006) about the survival issues in contemporary suburban China. [3] Cao’s Whose Utopia? (2006) displays the significant contrast between the lighting manufacturing employees’ reality and their aspirations and dreams. The video, which is included in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, showed her interviews with the manufacturing employees about their motivations for the job and their responses along with the performances developed by her and the workers. It explores the invisible emotions, desires, and dreams within contemporary Chinese society while the lack of the individualism is rooted with the constraints of industrialization.

Cao's work has been extended to the virtual world in her three-part work i.Mirror (2007), where she documented the life of her avatar, China Tracy, and her romantic engagement with another avatar, Hug Yue. In 2007, Cao also planned and developed a virtual city in Second Life through RBM: A Second Life Planning By China Tracy. It was a platform for experimental creative activities, one in which Cao and her collaborators use different mediums to test the boundaries between virtual and physical existence. [5] This work was acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for its contemporary art collection in 2008.

From 2009 to 2015, she has presented additional video works including RBM City Opera (2009), East Wind (2011), Haze and Fog (2013) and Rumba II: Nomad (2015). Her 2014 film, La Town “The New Desert”, was showcased at the Lombard Freid Gallery in New York. Shot with miniature figurines and buildings, the film begins with a post-apocalyptic scene of a destroyed McDonald’s restaurant on top of a small apartment building while tiny figurines mill about in the rubble of wrecked cars and buildings. It graphically shows Cao's perspective on a world following the apparent disruption due to the industrialization.

Exhibitions
Cao has held a number of solo exhibitions nationally and internationally including:


 * Cao Fei: Shadow Plays, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2015)
 * Cao Fei: Splendid River, Secession, Vienna (2015)
 * La Town, Cao Fei's Solo Exhibition, Lombard Freid Gallery, New York (2014)
 * Cao Fei's Theatrical Mirror, OzAsia Festival, Contemporary Art Center of South Australia, Adelaide (2014)
 * Haze and Fog, Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium, London, UK (2013)
 * Cao Fei: Simulus, Surrey Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2012)
 * Play Time, Lombard-Freid Gallery, New York, USA (2011)
 * RMB City Opera Live Performance Tour, Culturescapes 2010, Basel, Bern, Switzerland (2010)
 * Cao Fei: Live in RMB City, Shiseido Gallery Solo Exhibition, Tokyo, Japan (2009)
 * Cao Fei: Utopia, Artspace, Aukland, New Zealand (2009)
 * Cao Fei: RMB City, Serpentine Gallery, London, England (2009)
 * RMB City, Lombard-Freid Projects, New York, USA (2008)
 * Cao Fei, Le Plateau, Paris, France (2008)
 * Cao Fei: Whose Utopia?, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, USA (2007)
 * Hip Hop, Lombard-Freid Projects, New York (2006)
 * COSPlayers, Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2006)
 * COSPlayers, Courtyard Gallery, Beijing, China (2005)
 * The San Yuan Li Project, Courtyard Gallery, Beijing, China (2004)

She also participated in international biennials including the Guangzhou Triennial (2002, 2005), Istanbul Biennial (2007), Prospect New Orleans (2008–09), Sydney Biennial (2009) and Venice Biennale (2011). Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou (2003), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2004), Mori Art Museum, Toky (2005), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007–08) and New Museum, New York (2009).

Recognition
Cao Fei is known for her multimedia installations and video works while she actively produces photography and performance pieces as well. She is acknowledged as one of the most important artists of a new generation emerging from Mainland China. She combines social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to Surrealism, and documentary conventions in her works. Her films, photography, installations and performances reflect the rapid and chaotic changes that are happening in the Chinese society in the present day.

Art Market
Cao Fei’s works are widely sold in Chinese and international art markets. Those works include RMB City– Secondlife City Plannig No.1 (2007) sold for 16,128 USD at the Sotheby’s Hong Kong on October, 2015 and Silent Curse (+3 other works) sold for 24,192 USD also at the Sotheby's Hong Kong on October, 2009. Other auction results include Murderess (+2 works from Cosplayers series) sold for 17,741 USD in 2009 and Mirage sold for 21,890 USD in 2007.

Honors
Cao Fei was a nominee for the Future Generation Art Prize 2010 and the finalist of Hugo Boss Prize 2010. She received the 2006 Best Young Artist Award by Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA).