Cao Fei: Rethinking the global/local discourse

Abstract

Cao Fei (b. 1978) was born and raised in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou by the Pearl River Delta (PRD), ‘the factory of the world’, as the artist defined it. Working with multimedia, primarily video, photography and machinima, her practice engages with popular culture, regional trends and globalized fashions. With an early official participation at the China Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2007, Cao Fei is one of the most renowned Chinese artists of the post-Cultural Revolution ‘new new human beings’ (xinxin renlei), and one of the few women artists from the People’s Republic of China who has been recognized and collected internationally by art establishments such as the Tate Collection in Britain, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MoMA in New York. This article proposes to use Cao Fei’s work to explore the limitations of the global/local discourse and offer a more nuanced and complex understanding of this dichotomy in Chinese contemporary art.