Description:

Cao Fei is a global Chinese artist whose practice explore identities, capitalism and pop culture. Her early Y2K aesthetic are weaved through her multi-medium works from film, digital worlds and installations.

The book is a catalogue to her major retrospective exhibition developed together with the curatorial team at Art Gallery of New South Wales. Guangzhou and Sydney are sister cities and a big part of the exhibition is to resurrect Sydney's dormant China Town. The exhibition not only focuses on the artist’s recurring explored themes but include a creation of two new works involving the communities of Sydney’s China Town.

The design concept was driven by the desire to create an object of futuristic optimism, crafted to represent Cao Fei’s belief and to blur the language of print and digital aesthetics. Every typeface chosen, icons created and any decorative aesthetics are representations of the worlds the catalogue is trying to represent: Cao Fei’s virtual worlds, the dilapidating dormant Sydney China Town and the emotive spaces in between through the lens of the artist. The expressions are delivered through cohesions of graphics, materiality and content curation.

The materiality of the publication borrows the format of a Chinatown phone book but encased in a contemporary metallic foil cover with book edges printed to work with the covers, creating almost a digital-looking codex, resulting in a juxtaposing of the familiar and the new.

Graphics were designed to mesh Chinatown aesthetics, early Y2K and Cao Fei's version of Utopia. Print grids were utilised together with digital behaviors, resulting in a multi-layer reading experience, much like the artist's approach to her art. The package exudes romance, nostalgia, reality, hope and possibilities.