Descend down the escalators in the Art Gallery of NSW’s ultra-chic modern north building, and you’ll see an enormous octopus perched above the entrance to one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the Sydney summer – step inside a futuristic cyber cityscape with Cao Fei: My City is Yours.
An unfurling of purple tentacles beckons you to step into the multidimensional world of this influential Chinese contemporary artist, and become totally immersed in playful and inventive multimedia installations. Cao Fei (pronounced ‘tsow fay’) encourages you to jump into an inviting pit of foam cubes, walk through installations embedded with found objects, perch on a yoga chair to watch a short doco, lay down to watch another video projected onto the ceiling, sit in an original 1960s cinema chair from Beijing to watch a sci-fi film, and even strap in for a VR experience.
The exhibition offers a unique blend of virtual worlds and cutting-edge technology, as well as tributes to fallen city haunts both here and abroad. But for many Sydneysiders, the most remarkable sight will perhaps be the pitch-perfect recreation of the Marigold, the much-loved yum cha institution from Sydney’s Chinatown, which sadly closed for good in December 2021. Inspired by the restaurant’s 1990s Canto-decor, original furnishings have been salvaged for this uncanny installation – including the chandeliers and light fixtures, tables and chairs, regal red carpeting, and gold signage. All of this is juxtaposed by some big retro box televisions perched on the tables, each playing a different documentary film, which you can listen to through the chunky corded headphones attached.
Original dim-sum trolleys have also been reclaimed, and repurposed as ‘stamping stations’ where visitors can collect coloured stamps for each exhibition ‘zone’ in their own exhibition catalogue/‘city map’. The artist herself had dined at the Marigold multiple times during previous visits to Sydney, so it’s just as much a special place to her as it is for many other locals and visitors.
...she's made some of the most iconic artworks of the net art era as a result of free access [to the internet]
“It's very much an artist-designed exhibition. As you can see, she's taken over the entire space and transformed it into a full on cityscape… I think, as much as she’s a moving image artist, she's a great theatrical set designer, and you feel that here,” explains co-curator, Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd. As the curator of film at AGNSW, Ruby worked closely with curator of Chinese art, Yin Cao, as Fei also collaborated with Hong Kong’s Beau Architects on the exhibition design.
My City is Yours explores two main themes that have been present in the artist’s practice since the beginning of her career: the city and technology. Alongside distinctive visual motifs like tentacles and melons, Fei’s work draws you into communities and workforces that hide in plain sight, including fascinating youth culture movements.
“I think she's deeply interested in performance, in costumes and self reinvention; and I think for her, as a 20-something-year-old in Guangzhou, when she saw what her fellow peers were doing [with cosplay] she saw it obviously as an expression of freedom,” says Ruby. “She's very interested in ideas about utopia and how you can access that, and so one way you can access that might be through cosplay, one way might be through the internet, one way might be ‘freaking out’ on the street, dancing to hip hop! She's very interested in how you can access those ecstatic experiences which exceed the status quo, which exceed everyday experience.”
Fei’s way of examining the intersection between the online world and IRL, especially when it comes to youth culture, feels particularly pertinent in Australia today, where our government has just passed world-first laws to ban children and teens who are under 16-years-old from using social media. Reflecting on this, Ruby says: “I think Cao Fei’s work clearly shows the internet as a space of great creativity. She lived online in the early 2000s, formed incredibly meaningful relationships, and met people from all over the world.”
“Of course, that optimism is not necessarily still present in her work. She has watched as the internet has become taken over by big tech, by profit imperatives, by forces of surveillance, and so on. And of course, she is working in a very different internet – the Chinese internet is not the same as the internet of other places, it's a heavily circumscribed space. But I think for Cao Fei, she was the voice of a generation of artists born with the possibilities of digital media, and she embraced it and celebrated it, and she's made some of the most iconic artworks of the net art era as a result of free access,” Ruby adds.
...despite her fame and despite her very starry career, since she was a very young artist, she's always remained deeply interested in everyday people, in the human history
Throughout the exhibition, Fei explores the impacts of gentrification and industrialisation on neighborhoods that are important to her (including Sydney’s China Town, and others like it around the world). But in a way, she also asks us to observe how these forces have shaped the internet, and what the online world can offer us.
In addition to this, she also invites us to meet the largely invisible people that make sure all our online orders spontaneously appear on our doorsteps. As Ruby explains: “She's deeply interested in who delivers what you buy when you click, and the actual everyday lives of people who drive around the stuff we buy on a whim.”
Ruby adds: “That's what I really like about her practice, as much as she investigates these epochal changes which have transformed China, you know, urbanisation and technological transformation – I mean, she's lived in a really unique period of Chinese history – she helps you understand how those big abstractions impact everyday people on the street, in the factory, around the dinner table. I love that despite her fame and despite her very starry career, since she was a very young artist, she's always remained deeply interested in everyday people, in the human history.”
In spite of (or perhaps, because of) all of the digital elements to this exhibition and to the artist’s wider practice, there is a profound sense of humanity at the core of My City is Yours. Allow yourself to experience it fully, and you’ll walk away feeling more connected to others than when you walked in.
For 46-year-old Cao Fei, there’s also another deeply personal layer to this show. Her connection to Sydney doesn’t stop with her work, or with late-night feasts at the Marigold – her late sister, Cao Xiaoyun, migrated to Australia in 1998 and lived in Parramatta for many years before she passed away in 2022, at the age of 50. A fellow artist, she had a particular fondness for the golden wattle, Australia’s national flower. Cao Fei has dedicated a special new installation to her sister’s memory – titled ‘Golden Wattle’ (2024), it draws on archival materials, family photographs and artworks to explore one individual’s diasporic journey.
An invitation to peer inside the secret worlds hidden within various cities, both physical and virtual, there is so much to discover in this exhibition – so make sure you pencil in plenty of time, perhaps an entire afternoon, to linger when you do visit. (Hot tip: there is also a film series and an exciting events program to go along with the exhibition, find out more about that over here.)
This exhibition is exclusive to Sydney as part of the latest Sydney International Art Series, which also includes the blockbuster Magritte exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, and Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory at the MCA. Tickets are on sale over here.
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