My Future Is Not a Dream:
Interview with Cao Fei


In this dialogue, the extraordinary artist talks about her social, political, and economic inspirations for creating her art, as reflected in the exhibition at MALBA.


* This interview was conducted by Salvador Marinaro and Lucila Carzoglio for Clarín.






Cao Fei;  Photo: The New York Times



[Interviewer]
Salvador MarinaroLucila Carzoglio

[Translator]
Leo Lee
Clarín

16 FEB 2025


From Shanghai




Electric scissors—that is Cao Fei’s earliest memory, the artist who has masterfully captured China’s technological dreams. Her parents, both sculptors from Guangdong province, had brought them from Japan along with other everyday accessories. She recalls her fascination with their automatic movement. It was the late 1980s, and batteries were still a novelty in a country opening up to the world, embarking on the fastest industrial development in history.

A child of China’s Reform and Opening-Up policies, Cao Fei was among the first to experiment with digital cameras while still a fine arts student. In her southern province, the future arrived early. Thanks to its proximity to Hong Kong and Macau, it became home to the first foreign-invested factories, bringing with them Hollywood, MTV, pop culture, karaoke, and the first flip phones.

Her work in My Future Is Not a Dream, on view at MALBA until February 17, reflects on these transformations—both past and future. The exhibition spans nearly two decades of a career that explores the increasingly blurred boundaries between reality and the digital world, between the human and the machine. Through video art and installation, her work serves as an archive of what’s to come.



 A cyber-aesthetic universe that touches on science fiction, yet also our hopes and fears. The exhibition’s spaces intertwine—ruined cities and new digital landscapes, a Soviet-style cinema screening a retro-futuristic film, a lightbulb factory where workers dream, an automated plant where a handful of employees succumb to boredom.

The journey presents bodies in transit and culminates (or perhaps begins) in the metaverse—a new frontier signaling that something is on the horizon. Maybe that’s why an octopus, both solid and fluid, embraces and welcomes visitors. “Emotions, surrealism, the world of labor, and even imagination and madness are all connected. I think Argentina shares that language,” says the artist from her home in Beijing. Wearing neon yellow glasses on a Zoom call (a conversation bridging Shanghai and Beijing), she senses that her dialogue with Latin American audiences is one of equals.


WHEN WHOSE UTOPIA (2006) WAS FILMED—A CENTRAL PIECE IN THE MALBA EXHIBITION—CHINA’S RAPID INDUSTRIALIZATION COULD STILL BE SEEN AS A KIND OF UTOPIA. WHILE DEPICTING THAT LIGHTBULB FACTORY, YOU ALSO FOCUS ON THE WORKERS’ ASPIRATIONS. HOW DO YOU SEE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COLLECTIVE PROGRESS AND PERSONAL DESIRES IN THIS WORK?

 The collective is always in conflict with individual dreams, and this is especially evident in a socialist country. Like the Soviet Union, China followed an industrial planning model. We were raised with the belief that the people and social achievements are far more important than any individual benefit. This idea is deeply ingrained in our culture.

On the other hand, the factory shown in the video belonged to a German company, which allowed me to observe how a modern corporation operated. What I saw was a shift in systems, with different regulations and weekly rotations between production lines. Concepts such as team-driven innovation and a sense of community were encouraged. This was a typical motivational strategy of Western companies, quite different from the local structures of that time.
 In this environment, young workers still aspired to be themselves, even if family or economic circumstances prevented them from attending university. At the same time, many felt they were learning something in those kinds of companies.








Image from the video Whose Utopia (2006)





ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING MOMENTS OCCURS WHEN A FACTORY WORKER PERFORMS THE PEACOCK DANCE—A TRADITIONAL CHINESE DANCE. DRAPED IN TULLE, SHE GLIDES THROUGH THE AISLES AND STACKS OF BOXES WHILE HER COWORKERS CONTINUE THEIR TASKS, SEEMINGLY INDIFFERENT.


She is undoubtedly the protagonist. Three years after the video, she left the factory and is now the head of her own project—she runs a language school. Last year, during my exhibition in Shanghai, she told me that the video had inspired her and gave me the skirt she had worn. For her, it was a symbol of overcoming obstacles.



THERE’S A TEN-YEAR GAP BETWEEN THE WORKERS SEEN IN ASIA ONE (2018) AND 11.11 (2018), DURING WHICH PRODUCTION HAS BECOME INCREASINGLY AUTOMATED. HOW DO YOU SEE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FACTORIES AND THE COLLECTIVE TODAY?

 Today, it’s very difficult to find a place like the one portrayed in Whose Utopia. Back then, workers lived and ate together, they didn’t have mobile phones, and they had very little personal time—everything was done as a community. Now, in factories like those in Asia One, there are very few people. Workers rent their own apartments and return home after their shifts.

Even for 11.11—China’s biggest shopping festival, also known as Singles’ Day—factories hire temporary workers. There’s no longer a sense of belonging; people work for the daily wage. It’s a completely different phenomenon.

That said, Asia One still evokes collective memory in a moment when a worker dances with an octopus. The character wears clothing from another era and suddenly appears dancing to 1980s disco music with others in the factory—like a fragmented memory surfacing in the middle of an empty production floor. I think this is an old dream of mine or a memory of my generation, an image of the past that feels increasingly out of reach.




Pixelated Urban Landscapes




According to Forbesmagazine, between 2011 and 2013, China consumed as much steel and cement as the United States did in the entire 20th century. This pace was accompanied by the largest migration from rural to urban areas ever recorded. In just forty years, a historically rural country became one with an urban majority. This massive transformation of the landscape can be traced in some works, such as Rumba II: Nomad (2015), where automatic vacuums disguised as chickens attempt to clean old demolished neighborhoods to make way for modernity.
Just as quickly, the RMB City (2007) project raised skyscrapers. Cao Fei, or rather her avatar “China Tracy,” spent four years building a city on the Second Lifeplatform. The project, which mixed recognizable buildings from cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong, gathered designers, curators, and other artists. In this virtual space, exhibitions were inaugurated, documentaries were filmed, and the “interaction between the real and virtual worlds” was explored, says the artist.




RMB City project (2007)


Cao Fei's avatar

IN WHAT CONTEXT DID THIS PROJECT EMERGE?

 The world was in the midst of globalization, and the general trend was growth. When China won the Olympic bid, there was a social boom. New technologies, like Second Life, were also emerging, which, in a way, was the equivalent of the metaverse. There was great enthusiasm for the digital future.

We felt the need for an environment that felt real, where people could communicate and experience an alternative world—a false-real space where we could inhabit a utopia: a dream home with new relationships, offering the possibility to change avatars or even become an animal. It was a space full of interest, less consumer-driven, with an educational dimension.

Today, this is no longer a necessity. With artificial intelligence, we can generate fake videos, create automated content, and communicate with machines. Digital has become more artificial and functional. Technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI are now dominated by commercial and utilitarian uses. The big difference is that we no longer believe in the utopia.



THAT TRANSFORMATION CAN BE SEEN IN YOUR METAVERSE PROJECT DUOTOPIA (2023), WHICH, UNLIKE THE SPANISH WORD, MEANS "MANY UTOPIAS." IN THAT PROJECT, THERE IS NO LONGER AN IDENTIFIABLE CITY.
 RMB City was a project full of joy and exploration: I wanted to create a public space in virtual reality where anyone could enter, become a citizen or a traveler in the city. It was a dream project.



Today, however, dreams have taken on a different meaning. You enter key words and get a dreamlike image. We talk about dream images, but no longer about dreaming of human life in the future. It’s a flatter and more simplified concept.

Those Old Futures





Cao Fei and her works in which she blends augmented reality and artificial intelligence


In 2015, after the demolition of her studio in Beijing, the artist found a new workspace: a cinema palace that still preserved its Soviet-style décor. The red moldings evoked her name, Hongxia, which in Chinese means “Red Dawn.”

The district had been established in the 1950s as a complex for military industries. As part of the facilities, the government built a cinema for the workers, which later became a nightclub and a meeting point. With the decline of industry and the lowering of rent prices, the district followed the fate of other industrial areas: artists moved into the warehouses. Among them was Cao Fei, who, upon discovering Hongxia, began to research its history and the traces of the past that still lingered in the neighborhood.

For five years, she collected testimonies, explored archives, and as a result, recreated the theater’s entrance at life scale in the installation HX (2018). She then took her research on vintage futuristic aesthetics to the screen. Her film Nova(2019) narrates a brief scientific cooperation between Mao and Stalin that turns into a computer capable of teleporting users.




HOW DID YOU APPROACH THIS SPACE?

 IT WAS LIKE WORKING WITH RETROFUTURISM, THE MEMORY OF TECHNOLOGY...



The cinema was part of the welfare facilities of a factory – which, among other things, produced the first Chinese computers – a deeply communist model. It also had a swimming pool and other recreational facilities. When I stumbled upon Hongxia and its history, it was already in its final stage of existence. I felt the urgency to document it, to record what was left and explore its past.

It was a kind of emergency archaeological rescue, though it wasn’t a site protected by the government. It was an important cinema, a monument to the past that needed to be excavated, but in a personal way. In some sense, it was part of a utopia. Yes, the Soviet influence was obvious: large equipment, huge cabinets... everything was very bulky. That connection with technology fascinated me. I’ve always worked with future technology, like Second Life and the metaverse, but the Hongxia cinema made me look back. I started researching the origins of technology in China.

So, it wasn’t just about architectural memory or the collective life surrounding the cinema. Behind it was the state-run factory, and the workers who watched films there were the same ones who made computers.











Dreamed Times



Almost as a metaphor for utopia, Hongxia was demolished in November 2023 due to the constant drive for renewal. In China, futures compete, overlap, and settle. They are found in the plans of the People's Republic, which announce objectives to be achieved in the next twenty, thirty, or fifty years. There are official documents discussing the national soccer team in 2049, space exploration, the Moon, or the Arctic.

"This kind of optimistic trend planning has always been a tradition. But I don't think optimism is related to my work. It's just a reference for me," says Cao Fei.


FOR YOU, HAS THE FUTURE CHANGED?


I don't know... What does the future really mean? Where is it? The future hasn't arrived yet. That's exactly why artists have the right to imagine it, to create their own memory and timeline, to envision the future in our artistic universe. We don't need to depend on the real future.

If the future is always ahead, unreachable, then why not develop another reality? I think in that sense, my way of thinking is utopian. We try to create a different narrative within the world we live in. In a way, that's a form of resistance to reality. Because the future is also part of reality. The future is, in many ways, in the present.


[External links]

Cao Fei
MALBA
Clarín




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