Cao Fei, COSplayers 2004. From the underground of Guangzhou to the underground of the New York subway and to PS1 Queens, NY. Klaus Biesenbach has curated the sleeper show of the spring: a high-impact retrospective of videos, photographs, and digital simulations, charting China’s breakneck growth, environmental degradation, and social disquiet. Cao’s home town of Guangzhou, in the “special economic zone” of the Pearl River Delta, was among the first big cities in China to embrace turbo-capitalism, and the upheaval comes through in her early videos. In “Rabid Dogs,” office workers lick, pant, and scratch while wearing fake Burberry; “COSplayers” features young people in blue wigs and gold armor marching into an identikit metropolis. Cao built an entire world of economic dislocation, “RMB City,” on the now dated virtual- reality site Second Life. You can roam through it on a computer installed in the show (hang out in Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower and gaze at pandas flying overhead). Cao’s best works limn the personal consequences of economic growth, including the aching “Whose Utopia” (2006), filmed at a light-bulb factory, and the darkly surreal “Haze and Fog,” in which a driver hits a zombie bicyclist under a sooty Guangzhou sky. On view April 3–August 31, 2016.
