Four Chinese female artists of the 52th Venice Biennale
Updated: 2007-06-08 09:20
China Tracy 01
"China Tracy at Virtual
Venice"
Snapshot/2007
Cao Fei (b.1978) bounced into view not long ago; but now ranked among 100
future greats in Art Review magazine's 2006 survey and recently awarded this
year's CCAA Young Artist Award, she is standing out as one of a few eminent
emerging artists in not only domestic circus but the international art world at
large. Having grown up through the early 1990s, Cao has witnessed and tasted
much of a time inundated with rampant Cantonese smash hits, pervasive Japanese
anime, never-seen-before American soap operas and slicking Hollywood
blockbusters, all of which have left great impact on her later production. Her
photo series COSplayers attest to such an influence. Models clad in cartoon
costumes mimic the characters of Japanese anime. Their ridiculously menacing or
mindless poses suggest the carefree attitude of boys and girls living in China
today. Cao's larger-than-life dramatization of scattered cartoon scenes
translate the context how pop products affect and alter the lifestyle and
mindset of a younger generation into a serial explanatory frames of visual
footnotes to the optimism of teenagers. Following the path of COSplayers, Cao
launched a more playful and ambitious project Hip-hop, for which she picked
people of all ages on the street and have them play or more exactly shake their
bodies to the hip-hop music. In order to probe the cultural contrast and
assimilation in various parts of the world exposed in the otherwise same pop
culture, Cao sets each episode in a mega city such as Guang Zhou, Fukuoka and
New York, capturing the interrelationship between the street culture and the
ordinary people.
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