BASEL.- The Chinese artist Cao Fei (b. 1978, Guangzhou, lives in Beijing) is one of the defining voices of her generation, working across video, digital media, photography, installation, and sculpture. The artist’s works capture the rapid changes that have shaped China, and the Pearl River Delta in particular, since the country’s 1978 policy of Reform and Opening up.


📘 Explore the visionary world of Cao Fei through Cao Fei: My City Is Yours, a richly illustrated book available on Amazon that brings together two decades of her cyber-futurist art, surreal humor, social commentary, and reflections on life in contemporary China.


For Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future, her first solo exhibition in Switzerland and largest survey exhibition in Europe to date, the artist transforms the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart into a total work of art that takes the form of a city blending immersive installations and video universes from her oeuvre of the past thirty years. Cao Fei’s achievement as a pioneering creator of digital worlds is uncontested. Her early works have influenced an entire generation of artists from Asia and beyond. For over two decades, she has made art—from video installations and digital simulations to virtual-reality settings—grappling with the impact on human life of wrenching societal and technological transformations, establishing her renown as a leading thinker about art, media, technology, and the future.

Her videos and partly game-based environments are situated in factories, dreamscapes, and visions of a future. Exploring aspects of work, change, and the peculiar beauty of a globalized world, they address questions of identity, embodiment, and recollection.

Cao Fei examines how economic growth, technological development, and globalization influence our society, without ever descending into pessimism about the future.
Among the centerpieces of the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart are seminal works like Whose Utopia (2006), RMB City (2007–), Asia One (2018),
Nova (2019–), Oz (2022), and the Hip Hop series (2003–).

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Cao Fei’s art is her gift for integrating speculative and surreal elements into works that are often almost documentary. This aspect is underscored by elaborate installations that materialize elements from the videos in the exhibition space, further blurring the boundary between the physical and virtual realms.

The exhibition, which extends across all four floors of the Gegenwart building, invites viewers to delve deep into Cao Fei’s extensive oeuvre and makes for a singular experience in three dimensions in which the video works are not just on display but become an immersive reality. The exhibition is designed by Cao Fei in collaboration with Small Production, Beijing.

Artist’s book

An artist’s book is published on occasion of the exhibition. The publication includes a newly commissioned text by the award-winning Chinese science fiction author Regina Kanyu Wang as well as a series of new illustrations by the Chinese artist YuFei.

Wang’s contribution unfolds as a fictional narrative developed in response to selected works on view in the exhibition Testimonies to the Near Future, with China Tracy, Cao Fei’s avatar, as its protagonist. Works featured in the text function as both stage and backdrop to the story: from RMB City in Second Life to the cinematic spaces of Cao Fei’s film installations, China Tracy traverses multiple worlds.

Wang’s text is complemented by drawings by Yu Fei that respond directly to the narrative. The illustrations draw on motifs from Chinese comic culture, in particular Ye Yonglie’s post-Mao science fiction comic Little Smarty Pants Travels to the Future from 1978. While employing a narrative visual language, the drawings also address traditional modes of viewing associated with Chinese painting.

The dialogue between text and drawings is further enriched by a selection of film stills and photographs by Cao Fei. The artist’s book comprises 96 pages and is designed by Basel-based Studio Moono. Regina Kanyu Wang’s story is published in German, English, and Chinese.

Born in 1978, Cao Fei was raised in the southern Chinese megacity of Guangzhou, nicknamed the “Factory of the World.” She studied at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and now lives and works in Beijing, China.

Cao Fei is the winner of the SCAD deFINE ART (2024) and Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2021). She was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize and the Future Generation Art Prize in 2010 and was awarded Best Young Artist and Best Artist at the China Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) in 2006 and 2016 respectively.

Cao Fei has already had numerous international solo exhibitions, including at the following institutions: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2024/2025), Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai (2024), the Lenbachhaus, Munich (2024), Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2023), MAXXI, Rome (2021), UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2021), Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich (2021), Serpentine Gallery, London (2020), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2018), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2018), and MoMA PS1, New York (2016).

Her most recent group exhibition participations include Paraventi, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2023), A Gateway to Possible Worlds, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz (2022), Post-Capital, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022), Is This Tomorrow?, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019), Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019), Extreme. Nomads, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt a.M. (2018), and One Hand Clapping, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018). Cao Fei has taken part in many biennials and triennials, including the Shanghai Biennale (2004), the Moscow Biennale (2005), the Taipei Biennial (2006), the Biennale of Sydney (2006 and 2010), the Istanbul Biennial (2007), the Yokohama Triennale (2008), and the Venice Biennale (2003, 2007, and 2015).

Fondazione Prada will present Dash, a new multimedia project devised by Cao Fei for its Milan headquarters, from April 9 to September 28, 2026.



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