‘Cao Fei: My City Is Yours’: A Stellar Exhibition Experience

Few exhibitions are as aptly described as an entrance into an artist’s world as Cao Fei’s My City Is Yours, an extensive take over at the Art Gallery of NSW that explores the Chinese artist’s relationship to the past, present and future. 

Cao Fei has a career that spans across two decades, with her art spread across a number of different modes with a heavy emphasis on video. My City Is Yours is appropriately named, occupying an expansive exhibition space that emulates the contrast of history vs progress inherent to many forward-thinking cities. 

Feeling indeed more like a city than exhibition, My City Is Yours has no explicitly telegraphed route through the floor space. You can find one on the floor map in the pamphlet you enter with, but this experience in itself feels exploratory – plus, straying from the path means you’ll find artwork not explicitly shown on the map.

Once you walk through the doors of Hongxia, a replica of a now-destroyed cinema that entertained workers building some of China’s first computers, it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed by the lively mixture of eras and aesthetics that Cao has captured in this space. However, no section feels incongruous with the other. The old school cinema entrance, an industrial area and a facsimile of a Sydney yum cha restaurant all cohere through their emphasis on cultural identity. 

There’s plenty to see or do within the exhibit – as in a real city, it feels impossible to fully see all of it. Cao has brought with her a number of impressively lengthy video projects (including the feature length film NOVA), a surreal virtual reality experience and a number of physical artworks like miniatures.

Cao Fei creates a highly experiential exhibition

The video art makes up a huge chunk of the exhibition and consistently makes for fascinating viewing. Cao’s Hip hop series, for instance, is on display in the Marigold section of the exhibition in the midst of the loving recreation of a defunct yum cha restaurant.

An ongoing project where Cao visits the Chinatown of iconic cities and asks the people who live and work there to dance to hip hop music, these three videos represent the modus operandi of My City Is Yours – viewing cities as spaces of culture, community and play. 

One of the most fascinating ways the exhibition explores this is the segment dedicated to RMB City, an online utopia created by Cao on the video game and social platform Second Life. It’s a mesmerising look into a bygone era of the internet that managed to predict the Metaverse

The city is frantic, visually busy, but filled with everything you could possibly need in the digital world. The associated videos further elucidate this feeling about the mid-2000s internet, and printed out newsletters and books about RMB City in this section of the exhibition are utterly delightful to observe. 

With My City Is Yours, Cao Fei has delivered a uniquely entrancing exhibition that is deeply reliant on the experience of being in it. Her city is painted in neon, industrial, futuristic and rustic all at once, perfectly capturing the contradictory essence of living in an urban metropolis. An afternoon indoors exploring the world of Cao is a genuinely enriching experience in a way that few exhibitions can be. 

Cao Fei: My City Is Your City runs until April 13th. Tickets into the exhibition are 2-for-1 to celebrate the Lunar New Year until February 16th. Book tickets on the Art Gallery of NSW website.