Art by Cao Fei

Cao Fei works across video, photography, and virtual environments to track how rapid urbanization and digital life are reshaping China, often blending science fiction with documentary observation of real factory workers and migrant laborers. Her best-known project, RMB City (2007-2011), was an entire simulated Chinese metropolis she built inside the virtual world Second Life, an early and unusually prescient piece about digital urban space years before "metaverse" became a marketing term. Another key work, Whose Utopia, filmed employees at an actual lightbulb factory in Guangdong performing their own private dreams, dancing and playing music on the factory floor, as a quiet counterpoint to the anonymity of industrial labor.