ARTIT Spring Sumer, 2007

Work for Venice Biennale 2007
China Tracy Pavilion

Artwork/text: Cao Fei
Editing/design: Ou Ning

“There are no nationalities or borders here; we are all world citizens in a future world where everyone lives his second life and creates his own values.” —China Tracy

China Tracy is my avatar in the three-dimensional online virtual world called Second Life (www.secondlife.com). Entering the “metaverse” as a Chinese girl (which is also my first life identity), I was in the beginning filled with curiosity about this brave new world, just like all the other new residents. I learnt to fly and started to have fun teleporting before being attracted by a variety of virtual residents, new types of community, entertainment facilities and business models. I then tried to live a life completely different from my real one and to realize otherwise unrealistic plans. These ranged from getting to know friends from Rio de Janeiro to Britain to Scotland to Yamagata, Japan; to dancing in a lecture at Harvard University; chewing my fingers sitting at the top of the IBM building; becoming involved in political groups but making zero contribution; constantly changing my appearance and gender; purchasing attractive faces and sexy bodies; having a romantic experience in an Indian marquee; engaging myself in complicated sexual relationships with all kinds of people in a private flat; swimming on an island full of homosexuals and eavesdropping on their private conversations; listening to the monologue of an eleven-year-old girl suffering from autism in a remote valley; listening in a bar to a Frankfurt male railway employee talking about his career as a prostitute in the virtual world; enduring gunfire in a military base just to see the military wizard “King of Destruction”; undersea meditation; space walking; watching a breathtaking sunset; listening to frogs; flying over Times Square in New York; hanging around in Paris metro stations; hovering above Kyoto at the end of the world, and falling onto the Piazza San Marco of Venice…. All these experiences of China Tracy within Second Life will be videotaped and edited into a machinima documentary about the wanderings of “me” in this virtual world.

China Tracy is a doer, experiencer, documenter, discoverer and creator in a new world. As a participant in the China Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2007, I plan to build a temporary virtual China Tracy Pavilion within Second Life to exhibit videos, photos, diaries, and interviews I collected during my adventures as China Tracy. The pavilion will also serve as an experimental space for digital art, where like-minded friends in the online community can conduct research and curate exhibitions on such topics as artistic ecology, community models and the economical viability of Second Life, as well as exploring the interaction between the real and virtual worlds.

On the opening day of the China Pavilion, China Tracy will launch an online party in Second Life in parallel to the Biennale. All the friends I got to know in the digital universe will be invited to the premiere of my documentary. Everything that happens in the virtual world will be shared with the live audience at the Venice exhibition.

RMB City

In the near future, China Tracy will build a city dubbed RMB City within Second Life. This will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political.

China’s current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with  cursory imaginings of the country’s future. In RMB City, we will be able to cruise the digital ocean, witnessing a Ferris wheel rotating on top of the Monument to the People’s Heroes; looking down from the sky on the water of the Three Gorges reservoir gushing out of the Tian’anmen rostrum; passing the giant new totem symbolizing the Oriental Pearl TV Tower of Shanghai; hopping over the Feilai Temple marooned in a raging torrent; walking across a vast, desolate state-owned factory area in Northeast China; and finally hovering over the Grand National Theatre in Beijing. Also in our view will be gigantic planes gliding over terraces in the crevices of the central business district, and aerial super-malls. We will see water flowing into huge toilets on the container piers of the Pearl River Delta area before traveling through the sewage system into an ocean with floating statues of Mao Zedong. The rusted steel structure of the Olympic Stadium aka “Bird’s Nest” will be washed in splashes of ocean spray, while an aerial band on a floating sheet of the national flag filled with five-pointed stars makes a deafening noise that shakes Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV building, causing it to collapse….

Cao Fei