TESTIMONIES TO THE NEAR FUTURE TESTIMONIES TO THE NEAR FUTURE

In the lives of emperors there’s a second which follows delight within the boundless extension of the territories now we have conquered, and the melancholy and aid of realizing we will quickly hand over any considered realizing and understanding them.

ITALO CALVINO’S Invisible Cities unfolds as a surreal and philosophical dialogue between Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan. The e-book tells of fifty-five fantastical locations, – cities formed much less by geography than by reminiscence, longing, worry, language and time. Although the web age was nonetheless in its infancy when Calvino’s e-book was revealed in 1972, Cao Fei’s work exists someplace between its imagined dialogue and the implications of speedy urbanisation, technological enlargement, altering labour situations and the emergence of digital life. There is one thing particular about seeing a metropolis from excessive above, a second when it virtually appears potential to understand all of the lives being lived without delay, one thing in any other case tough to do whereas absorbed within the closeness of all of it.

Everything unfolds throughout the grid of streets, buildings, governments, and websites of encounter, consistently shifting. It is one thing all of us expertise with out ever totally understanding its complexity. The Chinese artist Cao Fei has discovered a technique to take us deep into the city membrane, whereas additionally permitting us to zoom out and shift views we as soon as thought had been set like concrete. While journeying via a few of her actual and imagined cities, we encounter documentary fragments merging with speculative components; actual locations turn into dreamscapes, and cities turn into psychological and social architectures. Cao Fei understands the town not merely as infrastructure, however as an accumulation of wishes, projections, contradictions, and recollections.

Speculation due to this fact turns into much less an escape into futurism than an inventive technique for understanding the current, transferring between cyber-futurism, magical realism (consider her large octopus), documentary commentary, and social critique. Since Cao Fei started working within the late Nineteen Nineties, digital tradition has reworked radically – from early on-line anonymity to as we speak’s immersive and algorithmically mediated realities. Her works ask how people emotionally inhabit technological methods, and the way creativeness persists inside buildings more and more formed by automation, surveillance, and digital participation. And like Calvino’s imagined cities printed between pages, Cao Fei’s worlds stay suspended between prophecy and reminiscence, impossibility and realism, they’re testimonies to a close to future constantly unfolding round us.

NISHA MERIT The metropolis is a significant protagonist in your work consistently reworking, haunted by reminiscence, but oriented towards the long run. What fascinates you about city areas as each a bodily surroundings and a website for creativeness?

CAO FEI What fascinates me most in regards to the metropolis is its perpetually unfinished, ever-renewing state – like an enormous movie set, torn down at any second and rebuilt in accordance with new narratives. As a consequence, all the pieces and everybody feels on the verge of disappearing: city villages, factories, outdated cinemas. In RMB City, I compressed the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Bird’s Nest (Beijing National Stadium), dams, and concrete villages right into a single digital metropolis. It is a rhapsody of urbanisation and a deconstruction of spatial energy. The metropolis is all the time haunted by recollections of the previous; earlier than we will totally savour them, it’s already speeding towards a brand new future.

NM Your work usually exists in an in between state of documentary and fiction, the digital and the bodily, actuality and hypothesis. It feels to me as in case you managed to create the glitch as an area itself. Why is the in between world so vital to you as an artist?

CF I grew up within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, a interval when China itself was caught in a dramatic in – between – state between outdated buildings and skyscrapers, deliberate financial system and market financial system, native tradition and popular culture from Hong Kong and Taiwan. All these opposites had been compressed into the identical time and house. I’m not happy with pure documentary fact, nor with mere fiction. Because no single perspective is sufficient to describe this indescribable world. Reality itself is already magical sufficient. When I movie factories, city villages, and logistics warehouses, I don’t see the social areas I inhabit or the themes I concentrate on as glitched or distorted. We should perceive their situation as a sort of naturality. The fixed complexities that emerge dynamically amid speedy social growth are extremely contradictory but co- existent and unified. They are filled with vitality and alter, but additionally deliver frustration, loss, and even tears. All of this drives me to discover and categorical tirelessly.

NM Across works like Whose Utopia and your tasks within the online game Second Life, you discover the connection between digital communities and phys- ical realities. What can digital worlds reveal about human wishes, labour, and identification that the bodily world typically can not?

CF When I filmed Whose Utopia in 2006, I had staff carry out their desires inside actual factories. Later, I entered the digital world of Second Life as my avatar China Tracy, and found that the anonymity of identification lays naked human wishes extra unapologetically. Virtual worlds have labour, love, and individuals who make a residing promoting digital skins, digital organs, and digital actual property. They act like a prism that refracts the invisible digital labour of globalisation. Today, a single click on on an e-commerce platform triggers a series response: cross-border manufacturing, all the way in which to the courier’s last-mile sprint. That is why I created Asia One in 2018, an art work in regards to the shift towards digital consumption. It compresses actual labour, emotional fantasy, and shopper want right into a single interface – one thing hardly ever seen all of sudden within the bodily world.

NM China Tracy has accompanied your follow as an alter ego transferring via digital house. How has this character advanced through the years, and what does she signify to you now?

CF I created China Tracy in Second Life in 2006. At first, she was like an ungainly anthropologist, exploring the unknown world on my behalf and capturing that unusual, melancholic encounter in i.Mirror (2007). Gradually, she grew to become a builder, concerned within the planning of RMB City, and likewise a documentarian. Today, everybody has numerous on-line avatars, and such overlaps are now not novel. But to me, China Tracy is sort of a time capsule, pre- serving the naivety, rawness, and utopian impulses of the early web. I nonetheless log in sometimes to verify on her; she stays trapped within the digital ruins of a bygone period.

NM You mix references starting from hip hop and remix tradition to cyber futurism and magical realism. How has the concept of remixing – culturally, visually, or traditionally – influenced the way in which you assemble your universes?

CF Youth subculture is embedded within the DNA of my follow. As a young person, I listened to cutout CDs and danced road dance. All issues, shifting symbols, developments, and histories will be recombined and recontextualised, sampled and thrown right into a time blender. Rem Koolhaas as soon as described the Pearl River Delta area the place I grew up as “the city of exacerbated differences.” All my work takes place on this website of intense, rising distinction.

Until October 11, 2026, Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart presents CAO FEI: Testimonies to the Near Future — the artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland and the biggest survey exhibition of her work in Europe to this point. In April 2026, Time named Cao Fei among the many 100 most influential individuals of the yr.

As featured in our new print situation SLEEK #89 – PLAY.

Credits: 

Creative Production: Hannes Aechter, Johanna Erdl

Special Thanks: Olivier Joliat