Vitamin Creative Space

Selected Works

 

Moving Image Work

 

Imbalance 257 (1999) video stills

“It is the typical stance of this generation, with its sensitivity and impulse, to try to blur the boundaries of all existing criteria and truths, to turn seemingly rationality into absurdity, and to mock at the given reality and the ‘legal’ matters: either the system or those who drag on with their lives under the system. I owe my courage to the restless adolescence that compels me to tear away any existing rulrs which block the way to our inner reality. Imbalance is an experience naked to us, an experience that might not be popular among Chinese college student today. It restricts us, transforms us, and forces us to expand and to change. It is the formula of a chain of events, the decease of adolescence, the edge of personal relationship, and the intermedium between bliss and despair.”

Cao Fei
Imbalance 257
1999
Single channel video ( 4:3, color, with sound)
25 min 40 sec

 

Video stills from Chain Reaction (2000)

“Chain Reaction is a kind of independent thinking itself. Since everyone has his or her own experience and values, I call the world of Chain Reaction ‘a view of schizophrenia’. Most of the images of the video surpass, as well as imitate daily life experience absurdly. e lm is to analyze and oppose evil by the way of using the power of evil inside human nature.”

Cao Fei
Chain Reaction
2000
Single channel video (4:3, color, with sound)
5 min 25 sec

 

Video stills from Talk without Speaking (2001)

“When speaking become difficult, hand language work as not only tools of communication, but also the content of thinking. Hand language is a kind of language that has surpassed expression itself.”

Cao Fei
Talk without Speaking
2001
Single channel video (4:3, color, with sound)
2 min 25 sec

 

Video stills from View on the Move (2001)

“Watching the light floating before you, staring and feeling, then you will find the rhythm of light, just like the uneven breathing. One will be sympathetic with even a shape, an object or a light. What I eager to catch is the image and the changing of it. It is the light, wind, substance and the technology that cause the change. My exploration of View on the Move completely comes from the vision itself.”

Cao Fei
View on the Move
2001
Single channel video (5:4, color, with sound)
5 min 20 sec

 

Video stills from Public Space: Give Me a Kiss (2002)

“Thank you, take a look at me, give you, a kisses …… to you, a kisses ……”

Cao Fei
Public Space: Give Me a Kiss
2002
Single channel video (4:3, black and white, with sound)
4 min 58 sec

 

Video stills from Hip Hop: Guangzhou (2003)

Cao Fei
Hip Hop: Guangzhou
2003
Single channel video (5:4, color, with sound)
3 min 28 sec

 

Video stills from Cosplayers (2004)

“All COSPLAYERS are very young, with dreams in their heads, spending all their waking hours in the virtual world of video games from a very early age. Hence when they eventually grow up, they discover they are living a life style frowned upon and rejected by society and family members alike. With no channels open to express their feeling and aspirations they resort to escapism and, becoming alienated and out of touch, they turn into ever more unbecoming characters. However, in that moment when they are turned into genies, chivalrous knights, fairy princesses, or geeks, the pains of reality are assuaged, even if the “real” world they are standing on has not changed to the slightest.”

Cao Fei
Cosplayers
2004
Single channel video (4:3, color, with sound)
9 min 12 sec

 

Father (2005) video stills

Cao Fei
Father
2005
Single channel video ( 4:3, colour, with sound)
88 min 10 sec

 

Production stills from Hip Hop: Fukuoka (2005)

Cao Fei
Hip Hop: Fukuoka
2005
Single channel video (5:4, color, with sound)
7 min 41 sec

 

Video stills from Milkman (2005)

“In my description, A Ming was a milk deliverer, but in his own description, he was a man singed for living.
I provided A Ming a role at the bottom of society, mixed with oppression and dream, on the other hand, A MING provided me his realistic situation without reserve, which is lowliness, isolation and frustration.
A Ming, a sprat, a real person, he enjoy his life with his jocular singing and humorous dancing.”

Cao Fei
Milkman
2005
Single channel video (5:4, color, with sound)
18 min 58 sec

 

Production stills from Hip Hop: New York (2006)

Cao Fei
Hip Hop: New York
2003
Single channel video (5:4, color, with sound)
5 min 15 sec

 

Production stills of Nù (2006)

“Despite all the shared experiences on this journey, embarked upon by the three in a bid to vanish from their cities, the fervour and energy they had partaken of will gradually fade away with the passing of time. They had managed to make their way to their final destination together, and at the point of arrival, their wishes had also come to an end. Now, each of them has rematerialized back in their respective cities. Yet they can clearly remember the trip they had taken together, their youthful and resolute obstinacy. From time to time, they are stricken by a sudden flash of doubt which inflicts them with a temporary sense of helplessness. How many times do we get to experience something like this in this life?”

Cao Fei
Nù
2006
Single channel video, 4:3, colour, with sound
52 min 46 sec

 

Video stills from Whose Utopia

“Their utopia further exemplifies how the wider and wider globalization is reshaping the Pearl Delta River area, and even the whole China.”

Cao Fei
Whose Utopia
2006
Single channel video (5:4, color, with sound)
20 min 20 sec

 

Production still from i. Mirror (2007)

“It’s perhaps no longer important to draw the line between the virtual and the real, as the border between the two has been blurred. In the virtual land, we are not what we originally are, and yet we remain unchanged. We always worry about the virtual space’s erosion of reality, but hopefully there’s new possibility of combination in our electronic second life, a new force that transcends this mortal coil. On the reality’s end of this combined ultra- space there is still love for simplicity and the pursuit of freedom. God loves people, but we are also each other’s salvation.”

Cao Fei (SL Avatar: China Tracy)
i. Mirror
2007
A Second Life Machinima (Single channel video, 4:3, color, with sound)
28 min

 

Production still from Live in RMB City (2009)

“A fantastic, exciting and unpredictable journey, the video Live in RMB City follows the first breaths, fears and curiosities of newly born China Sun, the baby of China Tracy, in Second Life. The camera follows baby China Sun’s wanderings and explorations in a revived RMB City, inspired by brand new additions created by a team of artist, writer, architect, and philosopher collaborators, and infused with a fresh stream of life.”

Cao Fei (SL Avatar: China Tracy)
Live in RMB City
2009
A Second Life Machinima (Single channel video, 4:3, color, with sound)
24 min 50 sec

 

Video stills from East Wind (2011)

Cao Fei
East Wind
2011
Single channel video (16:9, color, with sound)
11 min 14 sec

 

Video stills from Shadow Life

Cao Fei
Shadow Life
2011
HDV, 16:9, black and white, with sound
10 min

 

Production stills of Haze and Fog (2013)

“Cao Fei’s ‘Haze and Fog’ is a new type of zombie movie set in modern China made by one of the most important Chinese artists working today. Working with film, photography, installation and performance Cao Fei probes her personal and cultural relationship to metropolitan China.”

Cao Fei
Haze and Fog
2013
HDV, colour, with sound
46 min 30 sec

 

Video stills from La Town (2014)

“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
2014
Single channel HD video (16:9, color with sound)
42 min 13 sec

 

Video stills from Rumba II: Nomad (2015)

“In the video, several domestic vacuum cleaning robots are released at urban fringe. The robots navigate randomly in a demolishing area – a scene that we already witness and it could be found in different area under urbanization; a scene that is exciting and also being the norm in China.
The robots – visitors from the outer space, arrive in our world. By taking in the dust and ashes at the urban fringe, the land reality is collected and made into a sample; a sample that conveys our all time obsession and celebration of modern contemporary.“

Cao Fei
Rumba II: Nomad
2015
Single channel HD video (16:9, color with sound)
14 min 16 sec

 

Video stills from Asia One (2018)

“In 2006, I created a video work Whose Utopia based on my on-site research in Simens’ OSRAM light builb factory in Foshan, China. Eleven years later, I chose JD.com, a famous private company in China as a paradigm for my work. This project probes the potentials of logistics, a crucial link in the chains of modern industries, to connect the present and the future, thence to further reveal the existence within system (individuality on the assembly line; collectivity under fine division of labour), humanity in technology (the men behind the unmanned), future/utopia in the reality, alongside the future of Internet, they present to us a possible future business and even an ecosystem in the society.”

Cao Fei
Asia One
2018
Single channel HD video (2.35:1, color, with sound)
63 min 20 sec

 

Production still from Prison Architect (2018)

Cao Fei
Prison Architect
2018
Single channel HD video (16:9, color with sound)
58 min 48 sec

 

Stage photo from Nova (2019)

“A computer engineering company in the city of Nova, with the support of foreign experts, undertakes a secret mission – turning humans into a large-scale digitally intercepting and message collecting medium. A scientist who is part of the project, tries to make a great leap forward in this advanced technology. He experiments on his son but fails. The son turns into a digital soul whom exists in a computerized world, moving between the past and future, dreams and reality…”

Cao Fei
Nova
2019
Single channel HD video (2.35:1, color with sound)
97 min 13 sec

 

The quoted text above is taken from the artist’s statement.
All works of art by Cao Fei © the artist
Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space