Cao Fei’s Metaverse Is No Escape From Reality

Descending a ramp into Cao Fei’s exhibition, ‘Meta-mentary’, my eyes adjust to a space saturated with bubblegum pinks and blues. To the right is a gigantic, blow-up octopus (Asia One Octopus, 2024), a badminton court and a large mobile phone-shaped screen playing Fei’s 2022 documentary about the metaverse, from which the exhibition takes its name. A few steps beyond the ramp, I lie down on a foam-covered platform to watch Duotopia—1st Edition (2022) shown on an overhead screen; in it, Fei’s octopus-humanoid avatar, Oz, floats in front of a mothership. Lying here, I feel as though I, too, am on a UFO – one that acts as a physical manifestation of a metaverse utopia. Yet, upon proceeding to the show’s next section, a darkly dystopian feeling overtakes this candy-coloured vision.

The second of the exhibition’s four sections is dedicated to works made during the pandemic. Singapore Daily (2020) shows Fei’s daughter as she attempts to escape the monotony of quarantine. The child dances, disinfects plants and constructs fake weather with the help of props. Opposite, an installation comprises a tent, camping chairs and large projection screen atop a floor of woodchips. Inside the tent, Still Alive (2023) shows Fei’s mother mourning the loss of her second husband to Covid complications. On the large screen, teens are seen hanging out in urban parks (A Holiday, 2022). After spending time in Oz’s world, this is a sobering return to an offline reality; a stark reminder that when screens became our only mode of connection, all we wanted to do was leave them behind.

The third section of the show, dedicated to Fei’s breakthrough project, RMB City (2007–12), goes back to the early days of the internet, when then-emergent digital platforms like Second Life offered novel ways of finding and forming communities online. Fei developed both her first avatar, China Tracy, and RMB City on Second Life in 2006, three years after the platform was founded. At Lenbachhaus, visitors can interact with a replica of Fei’s original virtual world on a desktop computer via RMB City Openism Game (2012) and watch i.Mirror (2007), which documents Tracy’s encounters in Second Life, including being catfished while musing on love, intimacy and identity – conversations that still resonate nearly two decades later.

Closing the show is a failed utopia, a vision of what might happen to the world when cautions about development aren’t heeded; when humans become so entrapped within cyberspace that they don’t notice the world around them crumbling. In the video Nova (2019), a scientist working to develop a time machine accidentally transforms his son into a digital soul. In the fictional documentary MatryoshkaVerse (2022), set in a city on the New Silk Road, scientists study matryoshka dolls that have seemingly fallen from the sky and been unearthed in a remote landscape. The scene appears like an archaeological dig, with newly constructed yet already-abandoned hotels, factories and an amusement park looming in the background.

If there is a criticism to be made about these works, or of Fei’s practice at large, it is that they lean on fiction instead of naming any distinct sociopolitical ramifications of technological developments. But, to me, this evasion feels like exactly the point: rather than instil fear about, say, how technology is increasingly used to surveil citizens in the artist’s home country of China (or pretty much anywhere else, for that matter), the artist poses questions and leaves them open for the audience to confront from their own individual perspective. As the world keeps moving, what will make each of us stop in our tracks and (re)imagine a future in which technology – and the new bodies and worlds it helps us create – pulls disparate corners and cultures of the globe closer together rather than driving us apart?

Cao Fei’s ‘Meta-mentary’ is on view at Lenbachhaus, Munich, until 8 September

^{Main image: Cao Fei, MatryoshkaVerse 02 (detail), 2022, photograph, inkjet on diasec, 1.1 × 1.6 m Courtesy: © Cao Fei 2024, Sprüth Magers and Vitamin Creative Space}