In 2022, Sydney lost an icon of Chinatown. The 39-year-old Marigold restaurant – site of many wedding feasts and yum cha brunches – closed its doors for good. But it appears there is an afterlife: the venue’s reincarnation in Cao Fei: My City Is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆 at the Art Gallery of NSW has given many visitors a pang of nostalgia for the Chinatown of yesteryear.
Chinese artist Cao Fei has a special relationship with Sydney thanks to her late sister, Cao Xiaoyun, who lived in Parramatta until she passed in 2022. It is fitting that Fei’s birth city of Guangzhou is one of Sydney’s sister cities – the Chinese Garden of Friendship in Darling Harbour is one connection – and that My City Is Yours has a shrine dedicated to her sister, entitled Golden Wattle after Xiaoyun’s favourite flower.
Xiang si mu, the term for golden wattle in Chinese, can mean a flower or a mood for lovesickness, explains Yin Cao, Art Gallery of NSW curator of Chinese art and co-curator of this exhibition. “In Chinese literature and history, we use this phrase to talk about missing loved ones far away. For [Fei], this is such a natural connection to the city, to the gallery, to this project.”
Despite the retrospective elements of the show, Cao Fei: My City Is Yours 曹斐: 欢迎登陆 is largely about speculative futures – or at least, how the past represents the future – a key theme in the artist’s work to date. Born just after the end of the Cultural Revolution, away from the political constriction of Beijing, Fei grew up with a global outlook.
“She was born in 1978 and grew up in Guangzhou, where she was exposed to Western culture, so all that had great impact on her artistic creation,” says Yin. “Her artwork is quite playful and it has also this ‘out of boundary’ [style] because she grew up in Guangzhou, far away from Beijing, the political centre.”
But while other artists born post-Cultural Revolution tended to look back at what had been lost, Fei looked to the future.
“She is deeply interested in how the past, the present and the future are all interfolded,” says Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd, Art Gallery of NSW curator of film and co-curator of this exhibition. “She does not have a linear conception of time. She’s deeply interested in time travel, in speculative visions of the future – but these visions are always grounded in China’s material history and in the past.”
The exhibition is more of an experience than a gallery viewing, with different zones featuring audiovisual and other sensory elements, from neon-lit cityscapes and insights into industrial production, to the metaverse and a foam pit where you can watch videos. Some visitors also report being able to smell Chinese food in the re-created Marigold, “even though we cleaned the carpet”, says Yin.
The artist is already clear on what she believes will happen to Sydney audiences after visiting the exhibition. She writes: “What awaits them after travelling through the wormhole is a city that is no longer restricted by physical boundaries. It will feel like a platform where we can visit and communicate with one another. Can we meet in the past and greet each other in the future? Perhaps at the end of the wormhole, we can exchange and share our respective understandings of the emotions, identities and views of such a complex and ever-changing world.”
In addition to being Fei’s first solo show in Australia, it is the gallery’s first major exhibition of a female Asian artist in its 153-year history, and one that owes a lot to good timing. The show initially sprouted from the sister city connection between Guangzhou and Sydney, but the curators also saw other tendrils take hold.
“We started developing the show during the Covid-19 lockdowns and thinking about how Chinatown had been so badly affected due to anti-Asian racism. We thought about the work of Cao Fei because she has herself been so interested in celebrating Chinatowns,” says Arrowsmith-Todd.
The new commission Hip Hop: Sydney – a video of dozens of locals dancing to Korean Australian group 1300 in Chinatown – is a continuation of Fei’s series of tributes to Chinatowns around the world, and sits among some of her more famous installations and videos in the exhibition.
The other piece of the puzzle was the 2022 completion of the gallery’s new building, Naala Badu.
“The gallery had a vision when the new building was built to provide visitors with a different art experience: an engaging, immersive, kind of experience,” says Yin. “It’s a good match. It’s good timing, and in Chinese [it’s auspicious] to have everything line up.”
The curators recommend that visitors allow a few hours to take in the whole exhibition. Unfortunately you can’t have dim sum at the Marigold, but there is a special menu at MOD Dining for the duration of the show’s run, and don’t miss the schedule of related programs, including events throughout Lunar New Year 2025.
Cao Fei: My City Is Yours is showing at the Art Gallery of NSW until April 13, 2025.
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