Posts tagged: Cao Fei

Artist: Cao Fei

Title: La Town

Year: 2014

Medium: Single channel video (digital film)

Dimensions: 41m 56s

Accession Number: US2016-06

Acquisition info:

La Town presents a story of a changed, uncanny, metropolis. Turning to fantasy in order to explore the human condition, in this stop-motion animation Fei presents a mythical, post-apocalyptic city environment: The miniature, hand-made architectural sets are populated with figurines, dead animals, sea monsters and zombies. The camera pans around seemingly derelict low-rise housing blocks, gives aerial views of urban wasteland, and captures smoke billowing from a train that has crashed into a craggy mountainside. The film’s French dialogue is given in English subtitles:  “I see the daylight, I see my life and your death”; “Chaos will prevail”; “I myself, Lost in thought”. A sense of catastrophe pervades: this could be anywhere in the world, at any time. In the search for a happy social utopia, what is presented instead is a world of trauma.   

Everyone has heard the myth of La Town. The story first appeared in Europe, but after traveling through a space-time wormhole, reappeared in Asia and Southeast Asia. It was last seen near the ocean bordering the Eurasian tectonic plate, vanishing in its midst as if a mirage. La Town, struck by unknown disaster – where without sunlight, time froze. Polar night was all encompassing, so the few instances of white nights have been momentously recorded in the town’s history. Yet, through the drifting of time and space, various countries have rewritten La Town’s history, and details have been neglected. Now, the story of the small town’s past – love affairs, politics, life, demons and disasters – have all been sealed beneath the museum’s vitrines, the historical “specimens” becoming an authoritative but limited interpretation of this town’s history. Cao Fei.  

La Town has screened at PRESENCE: A Window into Chinese Contemporary Art, St.George’s Hall Liverpool (2018); What’s in Store?, Salford Museum and Art Gallery, Salford (2017); Lombard Fried Gallery New York (2014); 56th Venice Biennale (2015); State of Concept Gallery in Athens, Greece (2016) and the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 30th Anniversary exhibition, CFCCA, Manchester (2016). 

2017 group shows in which Cao Fei exhibited included: Art & Life: Social Aesthetics Obscured, Tranen Contemporary Art Center, Hellerup; Utopia & Dystopia (Part II), MAAT Museum of Art and Technology, Lisbon; .com/ .cn, K11 Art Foundation and MoMA PS1, Hong Kong; Repousser le tigre dans la montagne, Centre d’art Le LAIT, Albi, France; Haze and Fog, Tate Exchange, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK; Rip it Up, 2nd Edition of Changjiang International Photography and Video Biennale, Changjiang Museum of Contemporary Art, Chongqing, China; Videobox Festival, Le Carreau du Temple, Paris, France; Mekong – New Mythologies, Hong Kong Arts Centre Pao Galleries, Hong Kong. 

Artist’s website: http://www.caofei.com/ 

Gallery representing artist: http://www.vitamincreativespace.art/en/?artist=caofei 

La Town trailer.

Poem by Dr Scott Thurston in response to La Town.

Cao Fei’s 2013 film Haze and Fog is also in the University of Salford Art Collection.

La Town was purchased with support from Art Fund.

Artist: Cao Fei (b.1978)

Title: Haze and Fog

Year: 2013

Medium: Single channel video (digital film)

Dimensions: Variable. 46m 30s

Accession Number: US2014-02

Acquisition info:

Cao Fei is one of the most significant young artists to emerge on the international art scene from China. Her multi-media projects explore the lost dreams of the young Chinese generation and their strategies for overcoming and escaping reality. 

Haze and Fog, by Beijing-based artist and filmmaker Cao Fei, was the first acquisition made by Lindsay Taylor in her role as Art Curator for University of Salford in 2013, and it has since been screened across the world including at Tate Modern, London, Pompidou Centre in Paris, and MoMA New York.  

The film is a zombie movie set in modern-day China and explores the unfulfilled aspirations and lost dreams of contemporary Chinese youth. Rather than present a narrative based on ‘good versus evil’, Fei presents the zombies as those who have lost their traditional ways of life and exist in a state of ‘neutral modernity’, struggling to cope with the pressures of daily, urban, routine. Having migrated to the modern metropolis, the zombies fulfill their roles as cleaners, couriers, security guards and baby sitters, moving through their urban environments without fulfilment or meaningful direction. At first Haze and Fog seems to take a critical stance towards China’s rapid urbanisation as a catalyst for social disintegration. However, Fei’s work moves beyond the specificities of the local, to ask more complex questions about how societies operate according to class-based hierarchies, and what we can do to break free from oppressive systems.   

Haze and Fog was co-commissioned by the University of Salford with the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA), in partnership with Eastside Projects (Birmingham), Arnolfini (Bristol), Bath School of Art and Design and Bath University

Cao Fei studied at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2001. Recent group exhibitions include: One Hand Clapping, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (4 May – 21 Oct 2018); Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism Architecture VII: Cities Grow in Difference, Nantou Old Town, Shenzhen, China (2018); Simultaneous Eidos – Guangzhou Image Triennial 2017, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China (2018); PRESENCE: A Window into Chinese Contemporary Art, Liverpool, UK (2018); What’s in Store?, Salford Museum and Art Gallery, Salford (2017).

Recent solo exhibition have included Cao Fei, MoMA PS1, New York, USA (2016); Cao Fei, The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2016); Cao Fei: La Town – 30 years of CFCCA, CFCCA, Manchester (2016).   

Artist’s website: http://www.caofei.com/ 

Gallery representing artist: http://www.vitamincreativespace.art/en/?artist=caofei 

Trailer for Haze and Fog.