Dedicated to a leading artist on the international scene, Cao Fei. Supernova explores the works exhibited at MAXXI, Rome, on the occasion of the homonymous exhibition (2021-2022), curated by Hou Hanru and Monia Trombetta. Starting from a rapidly evolving China, Cao Fei explores the effects that this frenzied development has on humanity, proposing utopia and fantasy as the only weapons of survival and understanding of reality. In addition to two of the artist's most famous films, Haze and Fog and La Town, the volume presents Cao Fei's latest works, including: the science fiction film Nova, the VR work The Eternal Wave, and Isle of Instability, created by the artist in her Singapore home during the isolation due to the pandemic.
Accompanied by a rich iconographic apparatus of images and descriptions of the exhibited works, including RMB City, Hongxia, HXPublication, the book explores the practice of Cao Fei through the critical essays of the curators, Hou Hanru and Monia Trombetta, Olivia Khoo, and an interview with the artist by Cristiana Perrella; it is also accompanied by an insert with an unpublished sci-fi story by the author Wang Honghze. From the transformation of Chinese society to technology, from the obsession for development to the increasingly alienating human conditions, moving between utopia (and dystopia), the book accompanies Cao Fei's exhibition, highlighting the most pressing questions of modernity and the challenges that define our reality and, above all, our future.
Cao Fei (born 1978 in Guangzhou) is an internationally-renowned Chinese contemporary artist. Currently living in Beijing, she mixes social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to Surrealism, and documentary conventions in her films and installations. Her works reflect on the rapid and developmental changes that are occurring in Chinese society today.
Cao Fei's works have been exhibited at a number of international biennales and triennales, including the Shanghai Biennale (2004), the Moscow Biennale (2005), the Taipei Biennial (2006), the 15th & 17th Biennale of Sydney (2006 and 2010), the Istanbul Biennial (2007), the Yokohama Triennale (2008) and the 50th, 52nd & 56th Venice Biennale (2003, 2007 and 2015).
Cao Fei's major projects include a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York (2016), the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2018), a solo show at the Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2018), a retrospective at K21 Düsseldorf (2018), a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019), a solo exhibition Blueprints at the Serpentine Galleries, London (2020), a major retrospective at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2021), and a solo exhibition at the MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome (2021).
Cao Fei is a professor and a master advisor of the School of Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. She was also on the jury of The Selection Committee for the Curatorship of the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014), the jury of The Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary (2016), and the jury of Hugo Boss Asia Art Prize (2019). Cao Fei is the nominator of the Rolls-Royce Art Program Muse (2019) and the winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2021).
