Cao Fei

Throughout her career, Chinese artist Cao Fei has explored every aspect of our world, demonstrating great versatility and insight in her use of a broad range of technologies and languages. Since we first met in 2007, I’ve known her to be one of the artists best able to analyze modernity in all its most complex and contradictory aspects. Even so, she always keeps the human being in focus in a way I find exceptional. She infuses her works with strong doses of irony, sarcasm, nostalgia, and sadness, “showing that, in spite of all sorts of emotion and criticality, the most important thing is to have fun: fun as the pungent weapon to resist all ideological and economic dominations,” in the words of curator Hou Hanru. 

Her latest project, “Dash,” on view at Fondazione Prada in Milan, deepens her depictions of automation through an exhibition focused on smart agriculture in China and Southeast Asia. With this new work, she underlines how technology is never neutral. Instead, it can approach an almost divine dimension, revealing how traditional knowledge never disappears and can be reshaped in unexpected ways.

Prada is a fashion designer and president and director of Fondazione Prada