An Artist Whose Futures Keep Coming True | Cao Fei

Cao Fei pioneered world-building as an artistic practice. Between 2008 and 2011 she built RMB City inside Second Life, treating it not as a game but as a medium: a virtual metropolis she moved through as her avatar, China Tracy, who ran talk shows and feng shui sessions and conducted a love life in public. It was a working site of urbanism, economy and desire well before Web 3 arrived to sell “your own virtual land” in Decentraland — and far more critical about what such a place was for. Two decades on, she frames the project as obsolescence made visible:

RMB City has become “a kind of digital fossil”, her role with it shifting “from creator to witness”, Cao Fei tells Right Click Save via email.

This summer she stages two shows, in Basel and Milan. Testimonies to the Near Future, at the Kunstmuseum Basel, her largest European survey to date, lays out three decades of work as a city of districts — from the Osram factory floor of Whose Utopia (2006) to the Second Life metropolis of RMB City, Asia One (2018), and the sci-fi fantasy Nova (2019). “Dash”, at Fondazione Prada, is the new work: a three-part commission built from three years spent embedded with the agri-drone-maker XAG.

Born in Guangzhou, one of China’s leading manufacturing megahubs, to artist parents in 1978, Cao has spent three decades investigating what technology does to labor, and what it leaves of the human.

What keeps her working with each era’s newest tools, Cao says, is “not ‘newness’ itself, but what these new things do to us — mentally, psychologically, socially, and philosophically”.

Oz is the avatar Cao created for Duotopia (2022), roughly 15 years after China Tracy — half-human, half-octopus, with mechanical tentacles, built inside the Chinese platform Yuanbang Mega City rather than the US-run Second Life. Where China Tracy embodied 2007-era optimism, Oz is the ambivalent successor, “the integration of artificial intelligence into our society”.

The octopus, she notes, is “a visitor from beyond, quietly observing how we exist within these systems”. In Basel, Duotopia hangs in “The Playground” , above a ball pool, beside the arcade game Super Delivery — observing humans at play.

Escapism through play is a longstanding theme of hers. In Cosplayers (2004), young people use the characters of anime and comics to momentarily suspend reality. Imagination, Cao says, becomes “a kind of tunnel or refuge”, an “imagined shelter” connecting otherwise isolated, island-like realities.

Cao’s work traces the rapid evolution of Chinese technology, from China as the factory of the world to a China that is technologically innovative and driving green industrialisation. (In April 2026, a Hangzhou court ruled that companies cannot fire workers simply to replace them with AI.)

Her films render the landscapes of contemporary Chinese life — the city, the factory, the office — as backdrops for dream-like, Tarkovsky-inflected work. “I am one step to the side of fantasy and he is one step to the side of reality,” she has said of her father, the realist sculptor Cao Chong’en. “But we are approaching the same thing, and we are mixing real life and second life, reality and desire.”

Reality itself, she adds, “is composed of multiple narratives; it is, in a sense, already surreal”.

Two works function as a diptych. In Whose Utopia (2006), Cao filmed workers at an Osram factory in Foshan enacting their dreams — a ballerina, a musician with an air guitar — a meditation on the alienation of labor under industrial conditions. By Asia One (2018), set in JD.com’s automated “Asia No 1” fulfilment centre, the story had flipped: a love affair between two human workers and a robot amid towering shelves. Where Whose Utopia asks what the worker dreams, Asia One asks what happens to intimacy when the worker is nearly obsolete — the anxiety shifts from alienation to redundancy.

As Cao puts it, labor is moving “from once being ‘disciplined labor’ to now becoming a ‘displacement of labor’.” A third film, 11.11, restores the human to the center: shot around Singles’ Day, it tracks couriers and sorters at home, their hardships and hopes for their children — a human counterpoint to the empty warehouse.

Cao returns often to motifs that recur across the Basel show: the delivery man travels from 11.11 to the playable Super Delivery; watermelons appear as sculpture and as merch; matryoshka dolls occur in both MatryoshkaVerse (2023) and as decorative elements. The delivery man is the “last human link” in modern logistics, she explains, connecting “data with physical reality”. The matryoshka offers “systems within systems, backrooms extending endlessly, without conclusion”.

The watermelon is “a symbol of fragility”: it can crack the moment it falls, the customer may refuse delivery, and the courier bears the cost. “They are like tightrope walkers, balancing precariously at every step.”

Cao’s method is to embed herself in a company for months or even years, a corrective to cliché: she aims, she says, “to document and uncover the lived conditions of workers, the subtle flaws within these systems”. On Whose Utopia she filmed for six months, staging dream-interviews she deliberately chose not to show. In Asia One, shot on site at JD.com, workers dressed as Cultural Revolution-era model-opera characters dance beneath a banner reading “Humans and machines, hand in hand”.

In the socialist imaginary, automation was meant to liberate labor; here it liberates capital from labor — the iron rice bowl of Whose Utopia giving way, under Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation, to gig-work precarity.

Cao’s stance reads as a humanist rebuttal to Lawrence Lek’s concept of Sinofuturism, elaborated in his 2016 video essay Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD), which posits China as the foundation of a technologically advanced future — its people cast as components of a greater artificial intelligence poised not to take over the world, but simply to outlive it. Lek now reads as prescient: China became a global leader in robotics and advanced manufacturing, even as its government eyes the most intimate human-machine interface — the phone in your hand — with suspicion.

Cao’s work is often filed under Sinofuturism, but where Lek dissolves the human into the machine, she does the opposite: she keeps the ballerina on the factory floor, the courier in his flat, the avatar as interactive body.

“Dash”, commissioned by Fondazione Prada, extends the investigative  approach to the landscape. Its centrepiece is a 47-minute two-screen film on the mechanisation of Chinese farming, made with the Guangzhou drone company XAG. Then the VR piece Dash-180c places the viewer inside a discarded drone, reactivated by a monkey, drifting through derelict warehouses and ancient temples. A Land Ceremony built from Lombardy rice and drone parts completes the installation, alongside a temple of fertiliser sacks and an archive of propaganda posters and “Busy Farming” folk vinyls.

The show’s theme, taken from the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, casts technology as both remedy and poison: drones spray pesticide while AI sensors read soil moisture, yet workers still place a drone on an altar and wrap it in banners.

Cao reads the ritual as being about people, not machines: “What farmers are venerating is not the ‘machine’ itself, but rather the uncontrollable and unfamiliar nature of the technology… humans still need irrational forms of emotion to situate themselves.”

Three years in, the field changed the tempo of the work. “I turned ‘waiting’ itself into a form of practice,” she says “waiting for sowing, for sprouting, for wind, for rain, for harvest.” What she gained, she says, was “a sense of reverence; the awe that traditional farmers hold toward heaven and earth”.

Across the work a drift is visible. The method regresses from workers-with-voice (Whose Utopia, 11.11) to silent farmers surveyed from above in Dash — from participatory camera to aerial gaze, echoing the remove of the airborne Oz. Her worry is specific: those “older farmers who cannot adapt” hold “embodied understandings of seasons, climate, and soil, not captured by algorithms and being rapidly optimized out of existence” — even as she sees “a new generation of farmers returning to the countryside, bringing technology with them”.

The Basel exhibition title, “Testimonies to the Near Future”, leans on how, in Cao’s view, her scenarios keep coming true: La Town (2014), with its figures in an empty doomsday world, anticipated pandemic isolation.

She refuses to genuflect to the newest model — she rejects using AI in her own practice, and Dash-180c already imagines its tech as junk, told from the discarded object’s point of view: “being forgotten is also a perspective”.

It is a long way from China Tracy in RMB City to Oz, watching from the sky. RMB City's hosting platform Second Life has declined into “almost a digital ruin”, its utopia now “an earlier era’s vision” — so Cao turns back to the ground. “[My children] are 14 and 17, and they already feel scared of the future, of AI destroying the world, and they are turning towards the past,” she told Ocula earlier this year. “They dress in vintage Carhartt and listen to the music I grew up with. I grew up with the texture of mud.”