Utopia/Spectacle

My review of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s blockbuster exhibition, Cao Fei: My City is Yours, is published in Memo Review.

Art is simply politics’s sweeter tongue.

—Brother Day to Brother Dawn in Foundation, the 2021 Apple TV+ adaption of Issac Asimov’s 1951 sci-fi epic

Cao Fei is a Contemporary Chinese artist who has exhibited at New York’s PS1 (2016), Paris’s Pompidou Centre (2019), and London’s Serpentine Gallery (2020). Her current exhibition, My City is Yours, has found a fitting southern hemisphere home at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s new Naala Badu building, a cavernous space specifically designed for sprawling and spectacular contemporary art very much in the manner of Tate Modern and MoMA (and indeed, the building was originally named “Sydney Modern”).

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[…] Cao’s utopianism, so spectacularly put on display at the AGNSW, is mild and easy on the eyes. It is also far more pleasing and entertaining for the general public, and for institutions increasingly wary of criticism and controversy. A global contemporary art world that is weary of confrontational politics embraces Cao as an appealing alternative. She offers Chinese post-socialist visual elements bundled up in a mode of Western modern stream of consciousness, presenting Australian audiences with an experience that feels fun, entertaining and fundamentally, safe—both in and out of China.

A still from the opening scenes of Netflix’s Three Body Problem. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix (Online image of The Guardian)