Some excerpts from ‘Cao Fei’s Virtual Theater of Real Events’ by Yasmil Raymond:

” […] What is immediately distinctive about Cao Fei’s practice is her notion of truth, which includes both a real and a virtual world, underlining an ambitious commitment to embrace the contradictions within reality and the imaginary. In the past decade, she has formulated encounters across great distances -social, political, and geographical- that challenge what is commonly understood as reality. The subjects in Cao’s virtual and real video productions, photographs, and environments maintain a sense of humility and emotional vulnerability that is primordially human despite the illusion of possessing supernatural qualities […]

[…] In recent years, Cao has projected videos inside room-size environments accompanied by found objects that reinforce the context of the events depicted, transforming the typical projection room into a proscenium stage. Similarly, sound takes on metaphorical overtones in the videos. Rather than working with scripts, she consistently resorts to ambient sounds and lyrics in a number of works, constructing parallel narattives that hold together images and content through conceptual correlations […]”