Serpentine Galleries to feature Cao Fei’s ‘The Eternal Wave’
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Acute Art presents Cao Fei’s ‘The Eternal Wave’ in association with Serpentine Galleries.
Cao Fei’s upcoming exhibition, Blueprints, opening 4 March 2020, is the artist’s first large-scale institutional solo show in the UK which will feature her upcoming VR artwork.
The Eternal Wave follows the artist’s previous immersive digital and is based on the exact scale and scanned models of the artist’s kitchen in her Beijing studio. Cao Fei seeks to re-explore and re-imagine the past reflecting the changing nature of humanity.
Cao Fei: “While this is not my first time working with virtual reality, every time I do, it’s not the same. The technology is not the same, the team is not the same, concept, etc. – which makes the artwork feel like a newborn each time.
12 years after working on RMB City (on Second Life) in the lobby of Serpentine Galleries, I am returning for a solo exhibition. The times are different but I still am passionate about changing technologies in different times. RMB City was created in a pre-virtual reality era, it did not have the immersion and reality brought by today’s virtual reality. I used it to spy on our future internet life from that time. No one expected that today, we haven’t lost our first life, and the avatar hasn’t replaced us. We are broken up by different forms of apps to accelerate our life.
My solo show, Blueprints, will include this important VR work [The Eternal Wave], which is about our era of mixed life, not only the past and the future, also the recompilation of history, rebuilding memory on our future ruins.”
The Eternal Wave at Serpentine Gallery
The work is on view at Serpentine Gallery from 4 March – 17 May. The gallery is open 10-6pm, Tuesday – Sunday, plus bank holidays. Closed on Mondays. Admission to the exhibition and VR experience is free. You do not need to book in advance.