Curator Leesa Fanning interviews China Tracy in RMB City:

http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/exhibitions/rmbcityopera/cyberdiscussion.cfm

Reel Asian International Film Festival

A Space Gallery, Toronto

Nov 5-Dec 11, 2010

i.Mirror

People's Limbo in RMB City

Live in RMB City

For more info see:

http://www.reelasian.com/index.php/2010-festival/full-festival-schedule/details/125-rmb-city

"Live in RMB City"

Cao Fei: RMB City

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. San Francisco, CA

Oct 14, 2010 – Jan 9, 2011

http://www.ybca.org/exhibitions/

” Child: “Mother, is life here lonely?”

Mother: “Do you know what lonely means?”

Child: “Lonely is when I am here but mother is not online.”

Child: “Mother, am I unique?”

Mother: “Each real being is one of a kind; they are each unique and cannot be substituted. But here, we can clone ourselves or allow others to manage our lives. Sometimes, we encounter the threat of hackers or even destruction. We are not in complete control of our own lives.”

Child: “Mother, mother, which one am I?” (“Live in RMB City”, 2009)

http://www.friezeartfair.com/

Preview Date: 13th Oct, 2010

Public Date: 11am-7pm, 14th Oct to 17th Oct, 2010

Location: Stand H5, Frieze Art Fair

Regent’s Park, London

“PinchukArtCentre announced 21 young artists nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize 2010.

The Future Generation Art Prize established by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation is a major new international competition for artists up to 35 to discover and provide long-term support for a generation of emerging artists, wherever they may live and work [...] http://www.futuregenerationartprize.org/”

Next Autumn RMB City will take part in the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil.
“There is always a cup of sea to sail in” is the title of this year’s Biennale: a quotation from the Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima’s major work Invenção de Orfeu (1952). Exploring the inextricable interconnections between art and politics, the event aims at investigating the role of art in contemporary society and its constant power of reinventing new reality, or as Lima’s poem goes: “the power to sail on even without ships / even without waves and sand”.
What is this endless urge of poetry and art to express themselves in new forms? And what is their relation with politics and earthly contingencies?
RMB City and another approximately 160 artists from all around the world will disclose their positions from next September, so stay tuned for more information!

For more info see:  http://www.fbsp.org.br/29_bienal-en.html

June 16-20, 2010

Intrigued glances, embarrassed remarks on the absurdity of virtual love, enthusiastic reactions from the technology pros and an amazing response from the dazed younger audience. This is how “RMB City Opera” went on stage on one of the most prominent international modern art events of the world, the scary bogeyman ‘Basel Art Fair’.

It certainly provoked some reactions and it left a mark among the thousands of works by more than 2,500 different artists. In a constant dialogue with its booth comrades (ranging from disparate art expressions, from Ming Wong’s ‘world cinema’ to Duan Jianyu’s ineffable daily life oil paintings) the “Opera” charmed the public with its unique conjugation of entertaining aspects and more serious and intense comments on society and individuals.

If you sat down for a while and just listened to the music, you could almost feel surrounded by these glorious Red Army soldiers of the old Chinese ballets and fly over Basel skyline hand in hand with a charming black costumed Neo.

Look up to the sky next time you’re in Switzerland, you may see me flying with China Tracy and a bunch of awesome dancers from our second world!

Diana Picasso in RMB City Office

The 17th Biennale of Sydney takes place in different venues around Sydney Harbour, including: Cockatoo Island, Pier 2/3, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Opera House, Royal Botanic Gardens and Artspace.

Together with other 120 works form 56 different artists, RMB City is exhibited in Cockatoo Island, a former prison and shipyard imbued with historical reminiscences and suggestions.

photos@William Chan

For more info: http://www.bos17.com/

From  the Otago Daily Times (Online Edition),  J. Dignan, Monday 4 March 2010:

‘Contemplating the Void’
Guggenheim Museum,
New York, USA
February 12–April 28, 2010

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum invited Cao Fei to imagine how she would ideally utilize their iconic museum building in New York to stage an artistic concept. Envisioning Frank Lloyd Wright’s eccentric space as a yak horn, she built the Guggenheim in RMB City as a dynamic horn-shaped building. Drawing upon a Tibetan legend about being unable to fit a large ego into the horn, the Guggenheim in RMB City is a manifestation of the concept of “nothingness” and harmony in the context of the real and virtual worlds.

Inspired by the void in the Guggenheim central rotunda, Cao Fei envisioned her virtual and intangible museum, an ephemeral building transforming into a yak horn floating in the air. A homage to the vast power of imagination, creating ‘worlds’ out of emptiness, the work is also a reflection on the meaning of intangible spaces and virtual realities such as SL.

Until April 28, 2010, a photographic series of the Yak Horn will be on display at the Guggenheim as part of the exhibit “Contemplating the Void”.

For more info on the exhibit see:

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/contemplating-the-void

Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus

23 Jan-11 Apr 2010

RMB City takes part in a major exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.

Exhibiting an extensive range of works from different art currents and spanning 130 years of Art History, Utopia Matters investigates the representation of ideal society and alternative worlds in the works of various European and American artists and groups.

Among prominent works from Primitivism to the Nazarenes, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Neo-Impressionism, RMB City presents a unique and ‘cozy’ installation of its virtual space. Playing on the idea of ‘private utopias’ and the splitting between a ‘real’ and physical space and a virtual ideal world, RMB City takes the shape of an intimate room where visitors can actively experience its virtual existence. Through SL portals, videos, press material and old project installations visitors can actually enter Cao Fei’s utopian world as if they were in their own bedrooms.

As intimately suggested in RMB City exhibition slogan, If What We See And Touch are real, What We Breathe And Feel Are Virtual.

For more info:

http://www.guggenheim.org/berlin/exhibitions/utopia-matters

http://www.alternativearchive.com/caofei/article.asp?id=406

DATE

January 30, 2010 16:30-18:00

VENUE

UCCA Auditorium

LANGUAGE

Chinese

For more info see UCCA website:

http://www.ucca.org.cn/portal/activitie/view.798?id=363&menuId=36

After the official celebrations hosted in SL last January 10, 2010, RMB City opened up the Real Life space of its Beijing brand new office and shared with colleagues and friends the real side of its virtual existence.

The whole team, together with colleagues and friends, raised the glass to one year of great success and exciting projects.

We have crossed the boundaries of time and space, of real and virtual spaces and different forms of art.

We have attended the birth of SL baby China Sun, mused on and reacted to the difficult economical times.

We have staged the story of an all together ancient and cosmopolitan Eastern world and opened up to the distorted sounds of globalization.

We have danced ancient Chinese ballets and experienced the arrival of extra-terrestrials, studied the arcane language of Feng Shui philosophy and bargained fake worlds and utopias.

It is now time to THANK YOU ALL! RMB City is your city, too. Stay tuned and join us in our new 2010 virtual experience!