Cao Fei in "Fantasy" - Season 5 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

Dear ladies and gentlemen, I’m China Tracy, 
the avatar of Cao Fei,

and I’m her interpreter.

Our generation has grown up in a fluid and 
mobile environment where cultures mix and diverge.

Pop culture has spread rapidly into 
every corner of China.

When I was little, I would go out and learn street dance.

Later, I fell in love with hip-hop music.

I see the world with a sense of humor; street culture is 
a very natural, wild, free, and spontaneous form of expression.

It’s like the notion of sampling 
in hip-hop, which is to mix all different kinds of things together.

In music videos, visuality, 
montage, music, and imagery are blended into a single process.

Perhaps music takes the place of 
some of the narrative and feeling.

Music itself becomes a very emotional part of the work.

If I had grown up just focusing on the written word or photography or still images,

my way of 
thinking would have been totally different.

I had just graduated from college and had 
opportunity to become exposed to the working world.

I got a taste of reality in a pretty 
close and intimate way,

and I felt that I could critique reality through my artwork.

Looking back years later, the critique
seems a bit severe, even blunt.

But my later works began to reflect 
on a more thorough understanding of society as a whole,

and they are quite different from 
the impulsive urges of that early period.

[ strumming music ]

After I did the first "Hip-Hop Project," I 
started working on cosplayers.

We translate cosplay into Chinese as role-playing. 
It grows from a generation under the

influence of the cartoon culture.

Neither cosplaying nor hip-hop is native to China,

but when we experience it, we feel somehow that 
it has become very indigenous and original.

I was working part-time as an art director for 
advertising companies.

When scouting locations, we would
come across ruined scenes and images.

Those places have left a deep impression on me.

These settings and backgrounds are very important to the characters and how they relate to each other.

Even in real life, the cosplayers place themselves into cartoon characters roles

so much that they carry their cartoon
roles into their everyday lives.

It is a new kind of role reversal which also reflects the younger generation's discontent with their roles in real life.

Cosplay reflects the gap between these two generations.

Neither is willing to strike a 
compromise or reach an accord with the other.

When I got an invitation from Siemens 
electric, I started to work on the video "Whose Utopia?"

I thought that this might be a 
good opportunity to shoot inside a factory,

usually very difficult because generally there is 
a high level of commercial protectionism.

It’s not an expose nor is it about political correctness.

It attempts to examine this particular kind of reality from multiple angles,

how workers are on the lookout for the
chance and opportunity to survive.

It also has this avatar-like element 
with the workers role-playing their fantasies.

I often have the feeling that they truly value 
this kind of opportunity to remake themselves.

For corporations to let artists create works with the factory as the backdrop is an attempt to forge a corporate culture.

What artists do in reality in the art world is not all that important to the corporation.

What’s important is the project that is created.

My composer Zhang Anding introduced me to Second 
Life in 2006.

He was purchasing land in an online game, and he said that he can construct and have his own second life.

Subsequently, I opened this account, my
account for China Tracy.

I was absolutely enthralled and spellbound by it from the beginning.

I started with the very basics, how to take my first baby steps, and how to talk to people.

The whole process 
was totally captivating and riveting.

China is her surname, Tracy the given name.

I wanted to enter this virtual world with an ordinary person's perspective to see what was happening out there.

In the beginning, I was working with a
set of predesigned personas

that a new second life user can choose from when constructing their avatar.

Over time, I spent a lot of money buying her skin, her eyes, her figure, and even her sex organs to give her a more modern look.

"iMirror," my documentary made in second life, 
has a feminine perspective.

In this documentary, you will see a strong sense of selfhood, a sense of using my own body, my own self to explore this world.

The encounter between me and Hug Yue occurred when I was exploring around in my online journey.

I saw a very handsome guy 
playing a piano.

I was drawn by the piano music, which was very romantic.

Quietly and secretively, I stood at a
distance, shooting the scene of him playing the piano.

After a while, he asked China Tracy for a dance.

We began to get to know each other, and I found him a gentleman with a fine sense of humor.

There are many romantic stories like this 
one in second life between one male and one female avatar.

But perhaps behind the scenes, there may be two females, but in real life they are two guys.

Nonetheless, romance still transpires between these avatars

like the case with me and Hug Yue, even though 
it did not ultimately lead to a full-blown romance.

I finally learned that he was about 67, 
a fairly old guy in real life.

He is a communist, a big fan of Marx, and he would often wear 
a t-shirt with Marx’s image.

So I got to see both his romantic and idealistic sides. 
I also got the impression of him being

very political and zealous, having a kind 
of-- in Mao’s words-- romantic heroism.

Through "iMirror," you can peek into the digital world.

Everything is much more intense than the real world.

It’s much more unbridled and wild. 
That’s why so many people get hooked on Second Life.

In it, they try to find a kind of life 
with emotions that they want for themselves in real life.

But in the end, you will find that in 
this documentary, that is something beyond reach.

"RMB City" was conceived while I was
still exploring Second Life.

I was wondering if I could have my own
community and my own city built purely by myself.

So I started to envision what this city might look like.

In 2007, the video of RMB City 
was basically finished.

It’s an imagining, a draft design of the
overall appearance of this city.

It represents the building and development of an urban center with all that entails: investment, expansion, overdevelopment.

What’s important is to make an
imaginary city run smoothly like a real one.

We first came up with a list of options for all the different components in the building of 
the city,

different buildings and landmarks that we absolutely want to have in the cityscape.

We designed an urban plan by combining these different components utilizing collages.

Our next step was to feed the design into three-dimensional software to build it up into an architectural model.

Then we turned this software over to our virtual architects to be uploaded into Second Life.

I would prefer it to be a more open environment

where you can keep adding things to implement whatever ideas you come up with.

We’re now at a stage where we have to 
feel our way or as Deng Xiaoping said,

"Cross the river by touching the stones."

Take our current mayoral program for example.

Each mayor will serve a three-month term for RMB City

and be free to make his own policies and decisions or to have her own interpretation of the city.

I think this also releases me from any responsibility 
to keep control of the city.

There will be no party committee. We will have a board of 
directors.

We’ll have a judicial system with a judge somewhat like legendary Bao Gong, the Chinese embodiment of justice.

RMB City is in many ways like the painting from the Han 
Dynasty,

with clouds and mist, hills and rivers, and the interrelationship between humans and nature.

It made me wonder if this aesthetic is
deeply rooted in the Asian way of thinking.

I’ve always been looking for these connections, the differences and similarities between the past and present,

the Asian and the Western.

RMB is the abbreviation for the Chinese currency, 
the renminbi.

"Renmin" means the people, the general population, and the "r" could almost stand for republic or revolution.

In Chinese, the name sounds like “the people's city.”

So it comes to take on all these associative meanings. I think it sounds 
like "remember city," a city of memories.

I don't think that building my own city is an expression of individualism.

I feel it is precisely an acknowledgment of the belief in and the practice of democracy.

I think this project will lead to the foundation on 
which to experiment with utopian practices.

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