Cao Fei’s Temporal Transcendence

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Cultural exchange between China and Russia is a recurring theme across Cao Fei’s new show at SCAD Museum of Art, “At the Edge of Superhumanity.” Her interest in the topic can be traced back to 2015, when the Chinese artist was on the hunt for a studio in Beijing. It was then that she came across an old theater built with help from the Soviet Union in the 1950s that once served as a cultural center for its the surrounding community. It also aesthetically embodied a blend of the two country’s architectural heritage. Today, the Hongxia Theatre carries meaning as a bygone moment of hope and prosperity at the dawn of the postmodern era for the nation. Intrigued by its history, Cao moved her studio there and set about creating a film documenting the theater’s past through interviews with those who grew up with it as a social and cultural mainstay of the locale.

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Using footage of the theater, Cao created her 2019 documentary Hongxia, which showcases the space, now shuttered, alongside interviews with those who grew up frequenting it, whether in the context of watching movies, social gatherings, or casual hang outs.

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That same year, Cao completed a feature-length sci-fi film, Nova, that continues this exploration through a hallucinogenic time-bending dystopian fantasy tale. The narrative oscillates between a Cold War-era meeting between Chinese and Soviet scientists—with a man and woman from each group falling in love—and characters in a post-apocalyptic simulation. It’s eventually revealed that the Chinese scientist has forever doomed his son to live in the latter: a grim, futuristic cyberspace. “I have devoted you to this great experiment of humanity,” the father admits in a video message. “But I have lost you eternally.” The son then despairs: “I am within the black hole of time, so my body doesn’t belong to me. From a technical point of view, I can also not terminate myself. I am just a lonely electronic phantom.” Again, memory and loss loom large as the film meditates on the passage of time, or the impossibility thereof, when reality is suspended in code. 

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For the newer MatryoshkaVerse, 2022, Cao took inspiration from the city Manzhouli in Mongolia, which sits on the Russian border and is replete with replicas of Soviet monuments, matryoshka doll shops, and colorful, onion dome-topped buildings, among other relics of Russian influence. One scene features a digital herd of wooly mammoths parading down its streets, yet another instance of Cao consolidating place and time. 

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In Savannah, the opening of Cao’s exhibition coincides with SCAD deFINE ART 2024, at which the artist, 46, is this year’s honoree. On display across two galleries, the video installations also incorporate augmented- and virtual-reality elements; also on view are a series of photographic stills from the productions.

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Of her recent turn toward place-as-subject, Cao reflects: “Now, the subject is not a human, and it’s these spaces that actually have a lot of history and information. The way I treat these subjects is that I treat them as if they’re human,” she says. “During a long term project, you spend a lot of time there, and then that’s how you can truly be invested.”

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Cao Fei’s “At the Edge of Superhumanity” is on view through July 29, 2024. at the SCAD Museum of Art at 601 Turner Blvd in Savannah, Georgia.