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august 24, 2021 - Centro Pecci
Cao Fei. Supernova
Two museums come together for the first Italian solo exhibition by an artist of international renown.
An exhibition about the world’s mad rush towards a future with uncertain borders.
A reflection on contemporaneity between tradition and innovation, real and virtual
MAXXI #museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome
16 December 2021– May 2022, curated by Hou Hanru and Monia Trombetta
Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato
18 December 2021 – May 2022, curated by Cristiana Perrella
www.maxxi.art | www.centropecci.it
Rome and Prato, August 2021. Two museums come together for the first solo exhibition in Italy by one of the most innovative and visionary artists of the international artistic scene. Supernova, an exhibition dedicated to Cao Fei (born in Guangzhou in 1978 and based in Beijing), whose work explores the real and virtual, documentation and fiction, memory and the time to come, marking the accelerated transition from thousand-year old traditions to a hyper-technological future witnessed in China but that, to various degrees, concerns the entire planet, opens in December 2021, simultaneously at the MAXXI #museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome and the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato.
In these two locations, the exhibition presents a very extensive survey of the artist’s work, starting with works created at the start of her career up to the latest one, exploring the main themes such as the impact the technological revolution has had on our lives, the relationship between humans and machines, and the construction of the self in the era of virtuality.
Cao Fei. Supernova at the MAXXI, curated by Hou Hanru and Monia Trombetta, introduces the works within an installation path that starts with real and sometimes private places in the artist’s life – contemporary China, her neighbourhood, her study, her house – presenting us with a vision of a threatening and surreal virtual future.
Along with RMB City: Planning A Second Life (2007), Haze and Fog (2013) and La Town (2014), her internationally successful works, the exhibition also displays works Cao Fei has created recently, Hongxia and Nova (2019), which tell the timeless story of Hongxia, the neighbourhood where the artist lives but reinvented and set in the future; the virtual reality work produced by Acute Art, The Eternal Wave (2020), which continues the exploration of the virtual, reality and the perception of oneself in relation to technology; Isle of Instability (2020), a work commissioned by Audemars Piguet and set in the artist’s home in Singapore, where Cao Fei considers the psychological repercussions of the pandemic and isolation, exploring the social realities of daily life in this period.
Curated by Cristiana Perrella, Cao Fei. Supernova at the Centro Pecci concentrates in particular on the vision of the near future read through the transformations occurring in the world of work. Starting with the accelerated modernisation experienced by China, the “factory of the world” set to become the greatest technological power on the planet, Cao Fei’s work bears testimony and provides insight into the impact of the transformation processes that shape both production and the workers’ lives. The exhibition starts with the multimedia installation Asia One (2018), based on a film set in the world’s first fully automated sorting centre in Kunshan, in Jiangsu province in China. The exhibition at the #centropecci also features Whose Utopia (2006), a video and series of photographs about the lives of workers at the Osram lighting factory in an area outside Hong Kong that has become a site of nationwide migration by people seeking greater work opportunities in the country’s blossoming economy; Milkman (2005), a pseudo-documentary that explores the harsh daily reality and fantasies of escape into virtual worlds of the working class in China, and the installation Rumba 01 and 02 (2016), where two robot vacuum cleaners with their spasmodic and purposeless movements reflect the conditions of many people today: feeling adrift, toiling within a strictly limited range of activities, and struggling to find a way out.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication containing texts by the curators and Wang Hongzhe, Olivia Koo, Simone Pieranni, Patrick Rhine, published by Nero Editions.
01 MAXXI CAOFEI Nova
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01 PECCI Cao Fei Asia One 06 2018 Inkjet Print
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02 MAXXI CAOFEI Nova
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02 PECCI Cao Fei Asia One 09 2018 Inkjet Print
3425x2568, 2MB
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