Cao Fei – My Future ist not a Dream

What can art be, mean, and accomplish in a virtual world whose pace of development is faster than ever before? If we look at the work of the Chinese multimedia and video artist Cao Fei, who was born in Guangzhou in 1978, we notice that the speed of this progress can be preserved quite impressively in the form of digitally produced (moving) images.

For Various Others, Munich’s Espace Louis Vuitton is showing selected films and images by Cao from the 2000s, in which (among other things) a city she designed in the virtual game Second Life (RMB CITY), forms the starting point of her artistic production. On view are snapshot settings comprised of objects, avatars, and artificial-looking color worlds that are complex in both form and content. Her references for these are a radically changing Chinese society and, in particular, a youth culture in the process of making its own independent path out of modernity into an uncertain future.

Cao calls her exhibition My Future is not a Dream and her videos and images confront viewers with existential questions: What do life, work, love, and suffering mean in a virtually shaped future? What quality do our longings and spirituality have when the tools and possibilities for their fulfillment are a) dictated by ourselves as well as b) growing exponentially? And finally, is a distinction between real and virtual even relevant for art or the manifold metaverses in which art will take place in the future?

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CAO FEI My Future ist not a Dream
VARIOUS OTHERS 2021: Espace Louis Vuitton
10.09.2021 – 09.01.2022
Opening 10.09.
Monday – Friday, 12:00 – 19:00; Saturday, 10:00 – 18:00; Free admission
de.louisvuitton.com