Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future

Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future turns Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart into a city of screens, sets, avatars, factories, and imagined streets. The exhibition brings together thirty years of the Chinese artist’s work, moving through video, digital media, photography, installation, and sculpture to follow the social and technological shifts that have reshaped China, especially the Pearl River Delta.

Across all four floors, Cao Fei’s works move between documentary observation and speculative fiction. Factory workers perform dreams between machines, cosplayers drift through construction zones, and virtual cities carry the desires and anxieties of a networked world. The show frames her practice as a way of reading the near future through bodies, labor, memory, and digital space, with the physical gallery absorbing the logic of the worlds on screen.