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...

People dressed up as dogs make weird things....

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...

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

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 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 ...

Once the site of China's early tech industry, Jiuxiangiao is now a 'shanty area' slated for urban renewal. Residents recall how the area grew into an advanced electronics district in the 1950s, as part of the Chinese government's first Five-Year Plan...

HIP HOP is a music which humorously expresses negative energy, it is popular yet it is belongs more to the public; Hip Hop comes from the street, from the lower class, it is marked by proletarian. HIP HOP is a kind of accusation, is a means to expre...

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...

Video, color, sound, 5 min...

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...

Short documentary about people involved in Cosplay....

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...

San Yuan Li, the collaborative project by Ou Ning, Cao Fei, and the members of U-thèque Organization, is a case study of the typical “urban village” phenomenon of Guangzhou in 1990s. Armed with video cameras, the crew penetrated San Yuan Li as “city ...

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: ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...