But her work is consistently misunderstood in the West partly because it has been assumed that since she questions the official aesthetics of the Chinese state that means she’s adopted a Western aesthetic sensibility. A major show at the Serpentine Gallery in London this year was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic but still managed to generate quite a large critical response. She had a solo show at MoMA PS1 in 2016 and has appeared in dozens of biennials and group shows around the world over the last fifteen years. Since the year 2000, Cao Fei has become recognized globally as among the more important Chinese contemporary artists. There was also the desire to create art from a Chinese sensibility without catering to Western ideas, aesthetics, tastes, political assumptions, or anything else. But that’s only one side of the story of independence that the artists of the “ Fuck Off” era were trying to assert. Ai Weiwei has, spectacularly, challenged Chinese authorities so directly that he’s been arrested several times since the “ Fuck Off” show and has spent time in prison for his efforts. On one hand, these artists were striking out against the standard socialist realism being advocated by Chinese authorities. The mood among many Chinese artists at the turn of the millennium was one of independence.

I bring up “ Fuck Off” because this was the aesthetic milieu in Chinese contemporary art at the time Cao Fei was reaching adulthood and becoming an artist in her own right. The show was an epochal moment in Chinese contemporary art and will, I’d wager, become recognized more and more over time as one of the crucial moments in the history of art in general, like the famous and era-shifting Armory Show in New York City 1913. They have created a show called “Fuck Off.” It is neither, like most exhibits of Chinese art at the time, sponsored by the Chinese government nor by any Western government or institution. The show has been curated and organized by two Chinese artists who will go on to become international art stars. The couple feeding blood to the dead babies are Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. Well, we are in Shanghai in the year 2000. Sun Yuan and Peng Fu, Linked Bodies (2000) Are these people trying to help the babies, connect with them somehow? Are they making fun of these dead babies or of the situation? Are we meant to laugh, cry, recoil in horror? What is this disturbing scene and why are we being subjected to it? It is a horrendous scene, made all the more horrendous by the fact that it is so compelling to look at, so fascinating to think about. They are feeding their own blood into the mouths of the dead babies, who receive the elixir without discernible effect as the blood dribbles down their faces. The tubes from the babies are connected to the arms of the couple. A Chinese couple, a man and a woman, sit in chairs on either side of the babies.

Are they conjoined twins? There are tubes connected to the twin cadavers. There are two dead babies sitting in a medical pan inside a nondescript room.

One hand clapping guggenheim asia one