China Tracy 01

"China Tracy at Virtual Venice"

Snapshot/2007

Cao Fei (b.1978) bounced into view not long ago; but now ranked among 100 future greats in Art Review magazine's 2006 survey and recently awarded this year's CCAA Young Artist Award, she is standing out as one of a few eminent emerging artists in not only domestic circus but the international art world at large. Having grown up through the early 1990s, Cao has witnessed and tasted much of a time inundated with rampant Cantonese smash hits, pervasive Japanese anime, never-seen-before American soap operas and slicking Hollywood blockbusters, all of which have left great impact on her later production. Her photo series COSplayers attest to such an influence. Models clad in cartoon costumes mimic the characters of Japanese anime. Their ridiculously menacing or mindless poses suggest the carefree attitude of boys and girls living in China today. Cao's larger-than-life dramatization of scattered cartoon scenes translate the context how pop products affect and alter the lifestyle and mindset of a younger generation into a serial explanatory frames of visual footnotes to the optimism of teenagers. Following the path of COSplayers, Cao launched a more playful and ambitious project Hip-hop, for which she picked people of all ages on the street and have them play or more exactly shake their bodies to the hip-hop music. In order to probe the cultural contrast and assimilation in various parts of the world exposed in the otherwise same pop culture, Cao sets each episode in a mega city such as Guang Zhou, Fukuoka and New York, capturing the interrelationship between the street culture and the ordinary people.

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