Cao Fei, Matryoshka Universe, 2022, dual-channel HD video, 16:4.5, color, sound, 37'38', commissioned by Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow
Written by Elbow Force
Edited by Hu Xinrong
Cao Fei's latest solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Lombach in Munich, Meta-mentary, is based on his work of the same name in 2022. "Meta-record" is not a compound word that can be discerned at first glance. Meta, etymology from the Greek (μετ?), means "in...... Where", "and...... Together", "Follow", or "Beyond comprehension". In the Chinese context, "yuan" means the open source of all things in heaven and earth. Therefore, it carries the atmosphere of innovation and uncertainty in different cultures. Its ambiguity suggests that the entire exhibition will focus on what the artist has been concerned with since the beginning of his work: embracing digital media with great uncertainty, while at the same time observing from a distance how digital technology affects people's lives.
The path to the Meta-Record exhibition is folded between the above-ground and subterranean worlds – if you enter the King's Square metro station, you will be faced with two passages, one leading to the metro and one to the exhibition area. Within minutes, people can weave through replicas of ancient collections and modern buildings in the metro station, while the magical sensation of the past and present unfolds rapidly. The exhibition "Meta-Record", like the virtual world observed by Cao Fei, is quietly folded into the parallel space of our reality.
Cao Fei, "Red Glow" (2019), installation view of Meta Record, Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich, 2024
The exhibition includes Cao Fei's works spanning nearly 20 years, witnessing the interaction between the development of the Internet and the changes in China's social environment. These works form three interrelated threads: (1) the migration of spiritual habitats in a rapidly changing external environment; (2) the impact of scientific and technological development on the construction of human emotions; (3) The construction of the digital body.
A place of forsaken and a place of spiritual sustenance
Cao Fei, People's Walled City (2007-2022), installation view of Meta Record, Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich, 2024
A space with history also carries people's spiritual sustenance, and the frequent construction of modern cities makes people's souls experience different degrees of wandering. If virtual reality is imagined as a space where human souls can inhabit in the future, then there is an increasing need for people to transfer the habitat of the mind to the virtual world and rebuild the foundation of the heart. In Cao Fei's project, she focuses on the fallen buildings she encounters in her life, trying to reconstruct these spaces in the virtual world that are emotionally connected to her.
Hongxia (2019) and Rising Star (2019) are two projects created by Cao Fei between 2015 and 2019 based on the Hongxia Cinema in Beijing's Jiuxianqiao Dashanzi Community, which lasted until the theater was demolished. This unit cinema built to commemorate the Soviet Union's aid to China's electronics industry in the 1950s has witnessed the changes in Sino-Russian relations. "Red Glow" records the history of the residents who have a deep connection to it, as well as the daily activities that took place in it. "New Star" is like an electronic continuation of Cao Fei's emotional connection with this space. The electronic ghost (embodied in the form of an astronaut) in the film stays in this ghostly place forever through its unrestricted body and wandering away from a huge digital archive.
Cao Fei, "Rising Star", 2019, single-channel HD video, 2.35:1, color, 5.1 sound, 97 minutes and 13 seconds
Cao Fei once said that she hopes to use existing technology to reproduce the vanished space or things in the real world in the virtual world. These buildings were left in the corners of reality, until the artist gave them a new lease of life.
Matryoshka Universe (2022), first shown in Munich, is a semi-fictional creation based on a trip she made in Manchuria. Located in Inner Mongolia, near the border between China and Russia, Manzhouli is one of the stops on the New Silk Road, which aims to connect trade between China and the Western world. What was once a city of hope is now accompanied by an inflatable matryoshka doll nested in an empty city. The work was created without flashy filming equipment or a pre-designed script, but the documentary sense of shooting with a mobile phone and the mammoth animation interspersed with it were enough to give "Matryoshka Universe" a touch of magical realism.
Cao Fei, Matryoshka Universe (2022), installation view of Meta Record, Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich, 2024
In Matryoshka Universe, the electronic ghost of Nova reappears on a Moscow-Beijing train parked at Manzhouli Station of the Trans-Siberian Railway, like a ghost wandering in the circuit board of a mobile phone, witnessing the artist's record of this utopian city lost in China's rapid development. While narratives from specific contexts seem to establish a silos of understanding in a cross-cultural context, the mammoth that appears in the film transports the viewer into a place where modern wonders coexist with ancient evolutionary histories. This is Cao Fei's unique approach to image processing: the past, present and future are separated and recycled.
Cao Fei, Matryoshka Universe (2022), dual-channel HD video, 16:4.5, color, sound, 37'38', commissioned by Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow
The city Cao Fei creates in virtual reality is like an elegy to the material reality. Compared with projects such as People's City (2007-2022), her recent virtual city project Duotopia (2022) is more detached from the real world and presents a world of imagination. At the same time, it is more like a reflection of the current virtual world: the postmodern self[1] – a city and image shaped entirely around one's own preferences, without involving any other. Brilliant but lonely.
Cao Fei, "Dotopia" Phase 1, 2022, 3D rendering of digital images, 16:9, color, sound, 2 min 40 sec, music: Ma Haiping, commissioned by Yuan Bang
Cao Fei's New Angel (2022), commissioned by the art agency Museum in Progress and the Vienna State Opera, is a metaphor for Walter Benjamin's interpretation of the "Angel of History" who cannot be blown away by a hurricane [2]. Petrified He can only be blown away from the future facing Him, He cannot stop awakening the dead, filling the ruined world to complete, eyes can only gaze at the ruins of the past. This hurricane is what people call progress. Under the gaze of the huge "New Angel" at the exhibition site without focus, we witnessed this grand advance.
Cao Fei, "New Angel" (2022), installation view of Meta Record, Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich, 2024
Human emotions in (virtual) reality
Cao Fei, Still Alive (2023), installation view of Meta Record, Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich, 2024
Cao Fei's early work already reflects her keen observation of emotional connections in the virtual world. From the early days of Web 2.0, people's longing and curiosity for real-time communication in the virtual world - "I, Mirror" (2007), "People's Walled City" (2007-2022); In today's era of information overload, people are still caught off guard by their inner emotions and connection to the outside world – "Still Alive" (2023), "Holiday" (2023). People's spiritual growth is not as rapid as the growth of technology.
The new work "Still Alive" (2023) records fragments of different scenes surrounding the critical illness and death of Cao Fei's stepfather. The images from the old TV in the tent are mixed with sentimentality with the sense of age brought by the analog signal. The image of the body being sent into the incinerator contrasts sharply with the colorful virtual reality works around it, and the disappearance of the body next to it is still far from the dream of living in the clouds. Cao Fei's mother's call to the departed lover is indescribable for the viewer's senses, and asks the question: Can love accumulate in non-physical reality? In what way can the passing of the physical body and the emotional connection formed by time be supported in the other reality (virtual reality) in which we live? Will the metaverse of the future have the emotional space to carry the emotion brought by this kind of flesh?
Cao Fei, "Holiday", 2023, single-channel HD video, 16:9, color, sound, 88 minutes 27 seconds
Another new work, Vacation (2023), is a collection of interviews with different individuals on how they spent their leisure time during the pandemic. Although people can connect with others in real time through the Internet, they are more eager to connect with nature when they can't go out and about. The need to shift from online to offline has led to a boom in outdoor camping and picnics in recent years, with people haunting parks or open spaces where they can exercise more frequently. The epidemic has undoubtedly embedded the metaverse into real life in advance, and behind the eagerness to connect with nature, there is a confusion caused by excessive virtual reality time, which invisibly asks, how will virtual reality deal with the placement of sensory bodies in the future?
Cao Fei, "Holiday" (2023), installation view of Meta Record, Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich, 2024
On the front page of the exhibition brochure, Cao Fei said: "I pay attention to the digital virtual world, and I also care about the real feelings of human beings." ”
Feelings, emotions, emotions are complex and beautiful products of the evolution of the human species. It has mysterious powers that cannot be measured or estimated. Cao Fei prefers songs full of feelings, and the nostalgic poetry shuttles between different images. In her works, she always calls for our perceptual self to return to the world full of imagination, rather than the objectively rational postmodern self that is consciously shaped.
Eternal digital flesh
When the digital world is constantly evolving, what cannot be solved is the irreplaceable sensory experience brought by the human body. The complex biological structure of human beings makes us full of emotions and feelings. Cao Fei's videos focus on how the virtual world intersects with the real world, as well as how people shape their bodies. In the exhibition, visitors can lie on a yoga recliner that is used to shape the body in the "Dotopia" installation, or play a friendly game on a badminton court where they cannot see each other. Before people could enter the metaverse, artists created the possibility for the audience to encounter in reality. Just as Cao Fei loves all kinds of sports in her daily life, this desire to use the body quietly spreads to the viewer's body through the subtle settings in the exhibition.
View of the exhibition "Meta-Record", Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich, 2024
View of the exhibition "Meta-Record", Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich, 2024
At the same time, the digital world is solving problems such as gender division, social status, and political disputes, which are troubled by the real body. The opposite of the physical body is the shaping of the online image. Oz (2022), an avatar that erases gender and specific human biocharacteristics, has a more nuanced touch as a continuation of the Chinese Tracey in the virtual world, merging the inorganic and the organic. This is like Donna Harawayy's proposal for a cyborg future: "On the other hand, a cyborg world may be an existing social reality and a physical reality, in which people are not afraid of kinship with animals and machines, nor of being forever half-identities and contradictory views"[3]. This cyborg spirit is more and more evident in Cao Fei's work.
Cao Fei, "Oz" (2022), installation view of Meta Record, Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich, 2024
In contrast to "Oz", which has surpassed the human form, Meta Record (2022) brings together the "metaverse" in the eyes of different people on the streets and alleys of China, showing that many interviewees maintain a cautious attitude towards the concept of this futuristic virtual world—the personal experience of wandering the Internet or the real world for more than 20 years often makes it difficult for them to easily say "I want to go to the metaverse". In the concept of the metaverse, which still needs to be further defined, the metaverse encompasses both physical reality and virtual reality. This means digital permanence and the synchronicity of the two realities, with their irreversible influence. Will the metaverse of the future be able to better coordinate the relationship between biological and virtual bodies? This is the artist's constant questioning of the audience.
View of the exhibition "Meta-Record", Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich, 2024
In Germany, where technology has not yet fully penetrated into every detail and corner of life, the image of China with the rapid development of Internet technology in the past 20 years or so has been compressed into a video capsule by the artist, which is unfolded in a cave, and has enough space to stretch out in an exhibition environment completely isolated from the outside world. The sincere expression of emotions and curiosity about future technology in Cao Fei's works also infects people who speak different languages in this European land. Like me, they are lost in the story of "Nova" and cry when they look at "I, Mirror".
Exegesis:
[1] The "postmodern self", as defined by Eva Elous, refers to "the self without a core essence, which is merely a series of roles played." The self created by the alliance between psychology and Internet technology is in the 'ontological' sense because it assumes a permanent core self that can be grasped in a variety of ways...... Now, the only true place of mind and identity is in the heart. To have a network self is to have a Cartesian 'self', in which people observe the world from within the wall of their personal consciousness and participate in the world through this observation. From Eva Eloth: Cold Intimacy: Why Is Love Getting Harder? Translated by Wang Li. Hunan People's Publishing House, 2023. "Chapter 3, The Web of Romance".
[2] In the ninth essay of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, written in the early 40s of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin pointed out that Paul Klee's Angelus Novus (1920) was an "angel of history" with his back to the future.
[3] Donna Haraway, "Anthropoids, Cyborgs and Women: Nature's Reinvention", trans. Chen Jing. Henan University Press, 2016, p. 326.
*Courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers
现场图片摄影:Simone Gansheimer, Lenbachhaus
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"Cao Fei: Meta Record"
CAO FEI. META-MENTARY
Kunsthalle Lombach, Munich
Until September 8
(Article from Art News Chinese Edition)
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