Imagining Possible Futures in the Work of Cao Fei

Cao Fei’s widely celebrated career presents a critique and exploration of China’s rapid urbanization and its consequences for human life and the natural environment. Cao’s works are very focused on urban environments, but they maintain an ongoing concern with the implications of urbanization and globalization for human self-expression. This paper examines later works, namely Haze and Fog (2013) and La Town (2014), with a focus on their uncanny defamiliarization of urban life as a vehicle for ecological critique, followed by an analysis of earlier works such as Cosplayers (2004) and Whose Utopia (2006). In all four projects, Cao highlights the fragility and potential crumbling of a neo-liberal, globalized China, through the lens of human residents’ engagement with infrastructures along with commercial and cultural spaces. While her more recent work suggests apocalyptic outcomes for these historical and political-economic processes, her earlier work is more committed to portraying alternative possibilities for the future through self-expression in unlikely settings. The ultimate outcome of Cao’s pioneering work is a strong case for the human potential to imagine otherwise, to create new futures within strongly predetermined histories, and to perform new possibilities within rapidly expanding and decaying urban spaces.