Beijing-based artist Cao Fei’s practice is based in video, photography, performance, installation, and internet-based art. She explores Chinese popular culture, while focusing on youth subcultures. Her work examines contemporary China’s many layers: on the surface it appears pop and playful, but closer inspection reveals a complex social portrait. Cao is perhaps most well known for her ongoing project RMB City, an urban island named from China’s currency that only exists in the alternative reality of Second Life. Cao has inhabited this world since 2009 through her avatar China Tracy who creates videos, games, and performances that explore the relationship between real and virtual life.

Shadow Life, Cao’s most recent video, is an adaptation of traditional Chinese shadow puppetry.  Puppeteers typically created the shadow puppets by manipulating small, two-dimensional figures cut from paper or leather behind a silk screen with rear illumination.  During the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279 CE), performances known as “large shadow shows” featured actors hidden behind the screen instead of puppets.  The intricate hand puppets animating Shadow Life merge these traditional art forms to tell a distinctly contemporary story of modern China.

Shadow Life references Cao’s memories of a Chinese Spring Festival Gala celebration that ran on China’s Central Television during her childhood. The narrative flows through three chapters, “A Rock,” “Dictator,” and “Transmigration.” Text punctuates each chapter but the hand puppets carry the story. In “A Rock,” a bird, monkey, and elephant debate what a mysterious  object is, each deciding it’s a favorite food until they are suddenly shot by a hunter who declares it’s a piece of gold. A blind man takes the gold to the Bodhisattva who reveals it to be just a rock. “Dictator” opens with a cheering and enthusiastically applauding political rally. The audience waves small books that recall Mao Zedong’s famous “little red book” of quotations. Following the rally, disembodied arms capture animals, a tank flattens trees, and cranes devour the earth bite by bite. Waving flags replace the trees as various caricatures of dictators make proclamations. The final chapter, “Transmigration,” poignantly follows the trail of the animals from the first chapter who are run off by excavating equipment that also levels a peasant village. The villagers search for each other through lonesome urban landscapes with their possessions on their backs until they finally reunite in the last scene.