Supernova

Cao Fei (b. 1978) is an internationally-renowned Chinese contemporary artist. Currently living in Beijing, she mixes social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to Surrealism, and documentary conventions in her films and installations.

Her works reflect on the rapid and developmental changes that are occurring in Chinese society today. Supernova explores the works exhibited at MAXXI, Rome, on the occasion of the homonymous exhibition (2021-2022). 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 Cao Fei's latest works.

Accompanied by rich images and descriptions of the exhibited works, the book explores the practice of Cao Fei through the critical essays of the curators, Hou Hanru and Monia Trombetta, Olivia Khoo, and an interview with the artist by Cristiana Perrella; it is also accompanied by  an unpublished sci-fi story by the author Wang Honghze.

From the transformation of Chinese society to technology, from the obsession for development to the increasingly alienating human conditions, moving between utopia (and dystopia), the book accompanies Cao Fei's exhibition, highlighting the most pressing questions of modernity and the challenges that define our reality and, above all, our future.