Across her multimedia projects we witness individuals coming to terms with both the beauty and the perils of a global, industrialized and hyperconnected world. Though raised in Guangzhou by two academically trained artists, Cao Fei came of age in the wake of the student-led revolution and rapid urbanization of China. She absorbed a vast range of sources, including avant-garde and French New Wave cinema, and developed an approach that centers everyday characters, usually from China’s working class, living between fantasy and reality amid the backdrop of the country’s expanding and changing megalopolises.

How humans adapt to this change is the recurring theme of her wide-ranging work. Cao Fei’s two most recent feature-length films, Nova (2019) and Asia One (2018), are represented both on screen and through suites of photographs, and each explores this shifting era in different ways.

Also on view are two earlier projects that exhibit this same sense of beauty and melancholy, always punctuated by moments of humor, which have come to characterize Cao Fei’s luminous films.

Haze and Fog (2013) also plays with cinematic genres, this time the western zombie film with hints of Jean-Luc Godard’s camerawork and vignettes depicting different scenes of work and family life in China. Cao Fei created this work in response to the economic crisis of 2008 in an effort to describe the feeling of entrapment, both internal and external, within a perpetual socioeconomic fog.

The exhibition is presented as an immersive installation, with the visual vocabulary and setting of Cao Fei’s films extending into the exhibition space. On the ground floor, elements featured in Asia One create the backdrop for the screening, such as green plastic flooring, red beam chairs, a yellow grid fence and wallpaper from a film sequence. On the second floor, the viewer is transported into the scenery of Nova set in the disused Hongxia Theatre in Beijing—a mid-twentieth-century film theater decorated in the style of the Sino-Soviet alliance, as well as the artist’s former studio space.