Supernova was published on the occasion of the homonymous 2021 exhibition at MAXXI. This volume traces the path of Cao Fei’s artistic research from 2007 to 2021. Through the narration of her works, it offers a glimpse of the panorama of contemporary China and its strong link with digital technology.
Starting from a rapidly evolving China, Cao Fei explores the effects that this frenzied development has on humanity, proposing utopia and fantasy as the only weapons of survival and understanding of reality. In addition to two of the artist’s most famous films, Haze and Fog and La Town, the volume presents the science fiction film Nova, the VR work The Eternal Wave, and Isle of Instability, created by the artist in her Singapore home during the isolation due to the pandemic.
The reflections of curators and experts and an unpublished interview with Cao Fei deepen the artist’s intense relationship with her own territory and with the Chinese cultural dimension: between the physical reality of her neighbourhood in Beijing—in particular, the former Hongxia cinema, which she transformed into a studio—and the intangible and increasingly frequented reality of the metaverse, the virtual place where she has created some of her works. The texts are accompanied by a rich iconographic apparatus and a detachable insert with a story by Wang Hongzhe, illustrated with drawings by Zhao Mengyao.