Movies: Cao Fei

Swiss collector Uli Sigg has played in the time of economic opening of China by Mao an essential role, which is still continuing. To better understand China, in 1980 as an entrepreneur and business expert to the country called Sigg art turns to and w...

The two protagonists – an architect and a prisoner living in parallel realities in the present time and an ambiguous distanced past, respectively – conjure up imaginations and experiences of imprisonment. In their dialogue across space and time they ...

Nova follows the story of a computer scientist engaged in a secretive international project; as part of his experiments he uses his son, who is accidentally turned into a digital version of himself and trapped in an eternal cyberspace. At once a peri...

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 exp...

Shadow Life, evokes folklore and communist festivals. The vignettes are performed by shadow puppets; the form of the hand is a synecdoche for the manual labor of workers and peasants, while the silhouette medium allows quick metamorphoses of a grands...

Cao Fei recorded her experiences within the online social platform Second Life. The result is a wistful, surreal vision of an alternative reality sprung from the pop culture fantasies and hyper-consumerism of contemporary urban China, while also tryi...

San Yuan Li is a 2003 experimental independent Chinese documentary directed and produced by artists Ou Ning and Cao Fei. Armed with video cameras, twelve artists present a highly stylized portrait of San Yuan Li, a traditional village besieged by Ch...

Darkly humorous reinterpretation of the zombie film, set in Beijing. Here the undead are real estate agents, nouveau riche businessmen, security guards, manicurists, and sex workers seeking contact in an increasingly individualized, alienating societ...

The documentary recorded the work overload of the entire JD.com logistics sectors before and after the Double Eleven Shopping Day in China (the equivalence of the Black Friday). From goods being sorted at JD.com's gigantic sorting centre in the outsk...

A three-part film by Cao Fei. Part one, 'Imagination of Product', shows workers and machines at the OSRAM lightbulb factory in China's Pearl River Delta. In the second part, 'Factory Fairytale', dancers and musicians appear in the factory, as work ...

In 2021, a young female worker, a male worker and a cute AI robot are working in a large automated logistics centre “Asia One Unmanned Warehouse”. After long periods of loneliness and repetitious labour in the factory, the young workers start to have...

The urban fringe of Beijing is the loosen bricks from fragmented land. A result of urban development. The dynamic and complex urban system produced and blurred out the edges between cities and suburbs. The size, scale and land use of different areas...

Model figures and plastic buildings in an imagined post-apocalyptic metropolis....

This video work is part of the acclaimed RMB City series which uses the idea of the ideal city as a framework for examining aspects of Chinese and global culture. Fei has created a realm in which the imagination has free rein but retains the architec...

RMB City project is developed by Cao Fei...

In Cao Fei’s most recent video work, East Wind (2011), a dinky blue Chinese truck with the face of Thomas the Tank Engine beetles around the streets of a Chinese city to the theme tune of the BBC program. The truck stops for petrol, attracting a crow...

Video, color, sound, 5 min...

The film is for the 1st Moscow Biennale. The director's father, Cao Chongen, is a famous sculpture artist. Ever since his juvenile time, he has been engaged in producing the sculptures of those who were the exemplars in industry, agriculture and mili...

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: ...

In Milkman which was made in 2005, Cao Fei sorrowfully captures the daily life of the nominal main character who is a milkman. He is sprawled all over his bed during the day and agonizes over the temptation of an online sex chatting show. By capturin...