Cao Fei: Photographic Journey – Chapter One: Game, Fresh, Storage Box

Cao Fei: Photographic Journey
Chapter One: Game, Fresh, Storage Box

In a world full of visual images, photographs are almost unnoticed. […] They are among the most common things circulating in everyday life. But this commonality obscures the inherent complexity and difficulty of photographs; for us, they always leave important, yet elusive, questions: What exactly is a photograph?

— Graham Clarke

The images I created do not present a more “natural” appearance; they are fictitious scenes, virtual emotions and feelings, or more or less fabricated and collaged versions of our reality. However, it must be acknowledged that all of these assumptions stem from my real memories.

— Cao Fei

Before we knew it, Cao Fei’s video and film practice has accompanied us for nearly a quarter of a century, while the acceleration of life, enhanced by technology, shows no signs of slowing down. We live within it, and whether consciously or unconsciously, we have come to take for granted the reflections of human conditions captured by the artist at different moments. Yet, we have not paused to question why these images have become projections of our existence, and why it is through images.

Between these fictitious scenes and the human reality, the situations crystallized through Cao Fei’s photography become an interface that crosses the boundaries of the virtual and the real. The project Cao Fei: Photographic Journey comes from such a real life-journey—this is time belonging to the artist’s life, the time inherent to the artwork itself, and not just the time of social reality or technology. Today, as everyone with a mobile phone becomes a photographer, the close connection between images and human life is more intensely revealed. Digital technology has brought adjustments to the meaning of photography, and Cao Fei’s practice precisely spans the transition before and after the digital transformation of imaging technology. Through this, we can attentively perceive her response, subversion, and reconstruction in facing the codes and conventions of photography.

Echoing the journey of life, Cao Fei: Photographic Journey will take place over the course of one year in Mirrored Gardens, it will begin in Space 2 and gradually extend into other spaces. Unfolding in different chapters, the exhibition will present segments of time that have accompanied the artist’s photographic journey, showcasing the ever-changing human drama, the joys and sorrows of the earthly realm, and exploring how photography traverses such transient emotions and worlds.

The first chapter of Cao Fei: Photographic Journey, “Game, Fresh, Storage Box,” begins with portraits of young people at the turn of the millennium. Cao Fei, along with her contemporaries, portrays their and her fantasies, desires, and the pride of insignificant little people. Thus, Cao Fei: Photographic Journey not only examines the changes in life since the turn of the millennium, but also reflects on the evolution of the photographic medium itself—this will be a journey that looks back toward the unknown.

Mirrored Gardens invites friends to enter into Cao Fei’s photographic journey. We hope that, as different chapters unfold, we might gradually gain insight into the desolation beneath the complexity of the world through Cao Fei’s lens, as well as her ongoing inquiry into human nature: What has shaped the humanity we possess today? What has shaped the act of photography, its forms, and its resistance to the passage of time?

Artist’s Biography

Born in 1978 in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, Cao Fei graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art in 2001. She lives and works in Beijing.

Cao Fei is one of the most innovative Chinese artists to have emerged on the international scene. She mixes social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to Surrealism, and documentary conventions in her films and installations. Her works reflect on the rapid growth and development of Chinese society today, and explore perception and reality in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of “Second Life”. Applying strategies of sampling, role play, and documentary filmmaking to capture individuals’ longings and the ways in which they imagine themselves—as hip-hop musicians, costumed characters, or digitized alter egos—Cao Fei reveals the discrepancy between reality and dream, and the discontent and disillusionment of China’s younger generation.

Fascinated by the world of “Second Life”, Cao Fei has created and designed her own virtual utopia, “RMB City” (2007–2011), where she is both participant and observer through her “Second Life” avatar, China Tracy, who acts as a guide, philosopher, and tourist. Cao Fei’s art practices explore the fluidity of a world in which cultures have mixed and diverged in rapid evolution. Her strong interest in popular culture, technological evolution, and urban transformation enables her to integrate the artistic process with specific social spaces and communities, turning her projects into platforms for dramatizing collective dreams. This is exemplified in HX, a nearly decade-long project (2015-2024) set in a vanished cinema Hongxia, where Cao Fei seeks to create dreams and memories of life and destiny amid the rapid transformations of reality.