Curated by Joseph Constable
Plenty of artists have drawn inspiration from their studios. But Cao Fei’s atelier will become uniquely fascinating fodder for two new installations appearing in her first major solo exhibition in the UK. One will draw on her work space in a former Soviet-era Beijing cinema—its decor and multifaceted functionality alike embodying the zeitgeist of a rapidly urbanizing China in the 1950s and ’60s. In the other, her studio kitchen will serve as the model for a self-contained room that will allow visitors to encounter real objects while also interfacing with augmented and virtual realities. These works will appear alongside other videos from the past sixteen years, which have cemented Cao’s reputation for idiosyncratically portraying the ways in which people are alternately buoyed or broken down by an increasingly urban, digital, and automated world.
