Cao Fei’s Basel debut looks backward and forward at once
Kunstmuseum Basel Gegenwart is opening the first solo exhibition in Switzerland by Chinese artist Cao Fei (b. 1978), whose work has long tracked the uneasy marriage of technology, labor, and imagination. Titled “Testimonies to the Near Future,” the exhibition gathers films and installations that map the evolution of technological capitalism through the lives of people often left at its margins.
Among the works on view are “Whose Utopia” (2006), “RMB City” (2007–11), “Asia One” (2018), “Nova” (2019–), “Oz” (2022), and the “Hip Hop series” (2003–). Together, they chart a practice that has moved from the factory floor to speculative cityscapes and digital worlds, while remaining rooted in the social realities of contemporary China. Cao has said the title reflects her sense that some of her scenarios later came true. She pointed to “La Town” (2014), which imagined an empty, end-of-the-world landscape that now reads with particular force after the experience of epidemic isolation.
That retrospective logic is central to Cao’s work. Her retrofuturist imagery is not simply about gadgets or virtual environments; it is about how systems of production shape human life, and how those systems can suddenly feel prophetic. In the interview, she described an earlier era in which technology seemed tied to liberation from punishing factory labor. Today, she said, the mood is more conflicted, as automation raises harder questions about work, value, and who benefits when machines take over human tasks.
The exhibition also reflects Cao’s ongoing dialogue with science-fiction writers. For the catalogue, she worked with Regina Kanyu Wang, whom she met in 2020, and she also cited collaborations and conversations with Han Song and Chen Qiufan. For Cao, that circle of writers shares a language built around speculation, ethics, science, and time — a way of thinking that helps her frame art as a form of anticipatory knowledge.
Running alongside the Basel exhibition, a separate project at Fondazione Prada in Milan turns to agricultural drones and their impact on farmers in China and Southeast Asia. Cao said her interest in the subject deepened after learning about XAG in Guangzhou in 2021. Taken together, the two projects suggest the breadth of her current concerns: not only the future of cities and screens, but also the future of food, labor, and the technologies that quietly reorganize daily life.
