Cao Fei mono show at K21, Duesseldorf. Until January 13, 2018

“It’s all so full of colors here”

Admittedly, Nina Hagen’s punk protest of 1978 is now quite outdated and a bit „fallen out of time”. Nevertheless, this quotation describes the fireworks on the neurons quite well. It flickers, sparkles and shines in all colours. Video film, photography, multimedia installation, but also photography form the focus of the current Cao Fei exhibition.

Düsseldorf’s K 21 presents the Chinese artist Cao Fei (*1978), who works primarily with digital media and network technologies. In Germany, her work can be seen for the first time on this large scale.

The show encompasses Cao Feis’ artistic work from 1995 to 2018. And some of it seems – as a retrospective, so to speak – very time-bound, which to some extent certainly has something to do with the medium itself. Because developments in the field of multimedia are developing rapidly. The “state of the art” of yesterday is often already technically outdated today. For example, Cao Feis’ confrontation with the virtual world (rather the worlds!) as her own avatar “China Tracy” in “Second Life” today seems a little “like from another time”. “Second Life”? We remember the parallel universe on the Internet, as an online 3D infrastructure and gigantic game with sometimes up to 36 million users.

But the fact that many of the works are time-bound, does not make the Cao Fei mono show any less interesting. Quite the opposite. In fact, the exhibition in parts seems like a kind of contemporary history in moving images or a video chronicle of a social development. And not “from another time” at all.

There is so much to see!

Really a lot. A good four hours of video film alone. Films of one minute or more are on offer as well as about 60-minute videos. Here it needs time and a strong will. Energy and determination. Maybe a little break in between with a cup of coffee in the museum cafe to calm the flooded senses.

Cao Fei reflects on China’s social and urban situation between cultural revolution, globalization and turbo capitalism. Massive changes that seem strange and yet somehow familiar to the Central European observer. Variations of metropolitan life, of present and future, of strangeness and isolation, of increasingly mechanized working conditions in an automated world, of dealing with nature and the environment. Social documentation and science fiction. Cao Fei implements all of this with images that seem familiar and understandable, as if they were global film aesthetics.

The „ghost in the machine”

Cao Fei weaves the private and the general finely together. For example, the film “Haze and Fog” (2013) was shot in the artist’s apartment block. With the help of artificial lighting, it tells the story of people’s inner emptiness and their alienation from the city. Cao Fei’s documentary installation “Nation.Father” (2005-2008) offers both personal and political insights. For this work refers equally to her father, a sculptor with a state commission who is well known in China, and to Xi Jinping, the current head of government, with whom China is travelling at supersonic speed towards the digital “day after tomorrow”.

The day after tomorrow is portrayed in “Asia One,” for example, a work from 2018 that is located in a gigantic logistics center. Two people, a man and a woman, seem to be the only people in an intelligent machine park and supervise the fully automated processes. Or is it the other way around? Do the machines control these people, who – by the way – carry barcodes on their arms, like the goods they tirelessly push back and forth? However, the initial strangeness of these two people then becomes closeness. And the machines get out of hand.

Perhaps it does exist after all, the „ghost in the machine”. Find out. Have fun!