CAO FEI

SCAD deFINE ART 2024 honoree Cao Fei (b. 1978, Guangzhou, China) is internationally regarded as one of the most influential and innovative Chinese artists of our time, recognized for pioneering digital artworks in the early 2000s. Living through the birth of the internet and China’s rapid urbanization in the 1980s, Cao Fei tells compelling stories through films and installations about the impact of social and cultural change on people, particularly Chinese citizens, articulating how these shifts alter their lived realities and dreams of the future. In this exhibition, Cao Fei transforms adjoining galleries into an immersive multimedia installation that examines the effects of the 1950–79 alliance between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, or the Sino-Soviet alliance. This historic political alliance led to an intense period of globalization, urban development, and technological advancement in China — major cultural shifts that Cao Fei’s parents’ generation experienced and that she herself similarly witnessed years later in the late 20th century. Noting this fluidity across time, Cao Fei presents this exhibition as a mode of time travel in which she blurs the nostalgic and the futuristic, the earthly and the cyber. Transporting viewers between reality and fantasy, this exhibition ultimately reveals how the spaces we inhabit not only shape our identities and relationships but also can redirect our search for meaning and purpose in life.

Press Coverage

Emi Higashiyama, “Existing ‘At the Edge of SuperHumanity’ with Cao Fei,” SCAD Linkedin, July 16, 2024.

Leia Genis, “Look to the past and fear for the future,” Hyperallergic, April 14, 2024.

Rachel Summer Small, “Cao Fei’s Temporal Transcendence,” Family Style, March 2, 2024.

Photos Courtesy of SCAD