There is much to see at “Testimonies to the Near Future”, the Cao Fei retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart, so much that you’re allowed to enter the exhibition twice with the same ticket. The exhibition occupies all four floors of the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart, which is housed in a converted paper mill overlooking the Rhine about ten minutes walk from the museum's main building. The show, which was co-designed by Cao Fei, has been conceived as a city with a street, a park, factories, a cinema, a playground — a highly Instagrammable installation, which shows that Cao Fei is totally in tune with her time — an office and a shelter.
The exhibition opens with a graffitied skating ramp, for which Cao Fei invited some local graffiti artists to decorate the walls of the ground floor of the Kunstmuseum Basel Gegenwart. I enjoyed seeing a reference to the Emil Ferris show at the nearby Cartoonmuseum. The skating ramp is one of ten immersive installations and environments, dealing with street culture, factory life and the metaverse, that invite viewers into Cao Fei’s world. Working across film, virtual reality and installation, Cao Fei conjures settings at once ordinary and extraordinary, registering the convulsive changes that have remade her native China and the wider world over the past thirty or so years. Born in Guangzhou, the sprawling metropolis bordering Hong Kong and Shenzhen, she has made the human cost of globalization, emergent technology and the internet age her enduring subject.
Two works anchor the show. "Whose Utopia?" (2006), the work that made her name, was filmed inside a lightbulb factory, where laborers stepped away from the assembly line to perform some ballet and hip-hop moves. "RMB City" (2007–2011) is conceived as a virtual metropolis built on Second Life and populated by her own avatar, China Tracy. Other works including "Asia One" (2018), "Nova" (2019–) and the hilarious "Hip Hop" series (2003–), which features ordinary Chinese citizens, young and old, performing hiphop routines, round out an oeuvre that has shaped a generation of artists across Asia and established Fei as a leading thinker on art, media, technology and what comes next.
I greatly enjoyed the exhibition and wish I’d had a few hours more to see more of each video installation. It is definitely one of the must-see shows of the year.
The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s book, which includes a text by the Chinese science fiction writer Regina Kanyu Wang and illustrations by Chinese artist Yu Fei as well as, of course, a selection of film stills and photographs by Cao Fei herself.
Cao Fei. Testimonies to the Near Future is at the Kunstmuseum Basel until 11 October 2026.