Crossing the threshold of Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future at the Kunstmuseum Basel last June felt like entering a trippy, technicolor dream. Spanning all four floors of the museum’s Gegenwart building by the Rhine, the exhibition invited me into its surreal, immersive installations, with each doorway functioning as a portal into a whole new world. Witty and poignant, Cao’s work playfully explores imagined technofutures while also uncovering what and who was left adrift in China’s rapid modernization since the second half of the twentieth century. Pass through a PVC strip curtain on the second floor, and you’ll find commentary on the lives of young Chinese factory workers. On the third floor, take your shoes off and pad across the pink carpet to watch a Super Mario Bros.-style game featuring an 8-bit deliveryman, or, as I watched many parents and their children do, jump into a ball pit overlooked by a giant inflatable octopus and screens featuring tentacled (yet humanoid) virtual avatars.
Amidst pulsing electronic music and maximalist whimsy, visiting the exhibition was, for me, overwhelmingly bittersweet. Upon walking through the front door, I found myself face-to-face with a vending machine filled with bright red cans of Wang Lao Ji, the Chinese herbal tea that soccer star Erling Haaland would coincidentally promote, albeit under the “international” name Walovi, later that summer. I hadn’t grown up drinking Wang Lao Ji, presumably because it wasn’t part of my parents’ formative years. My mom had immigrated when she was nine and only went back to visit Taiwan once after college, and my dad spent his entire life in the United States. The first time I had ever taken a sip of it was two summers ago, when my partner bought us some to cut through the Manhattan Chinatown heat. I considered buying a can at the exhibit, but after grimacing at the price, I instead opted to step back as other museum-goers, most of whom were white Swiss locals, enjoyed the novelty of the sweet, slightly medicinal taste.
On the second floor is an installation called “The Cinema,” modeled after the now-shuttered Hongxia movie theater in Beijing, where electronics factory workers once gathered in the late 1950s and 1960s. Slipping past the velvet red curtain over the entrance, I sat down in one of the old, rickety theater seats, not dissimilar to the wooden chairs in Yale’s Woolsey Hall. There, I managed to catch the tail end of one of Cao’s films, Nova. The film centers around a young man who, after becoming a test subject in his scientist father’s experiments, is trapped halfway between different points in time and space, alone in his splintered subjective experience. Missing the context from the beginning of the film, I was confused as I watched the young man, clad in a white spacesuit and astronaut helmet, wander the deserted ruins of a building. Then, I saw him approach the same site at a point in time earlier in history—the ruins had once been the Hongxia theater, converted into a dancehall in-film.
On screen, the young man danced under the purple lights with a cyborg woman, his electric heart and the wires in her torso glowing in the dimly lit hall. Other couples shuffled in and out of frame, yet the pair were evidently alone in their own world. As they swayed to the melancholic tune of Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2, they asked each other if they thought it was possible to ever return to their original states, who they were back when they were “normal” and “whole” people. Though some of the nuance was surely lost in my partial reliance on the English subtitles, the answer seemed to be a resounding no.
In the last few minutes of the film, the young man was alone again, crouching in abandoned spaces and starting to lose hope in finding a way back to his father. The elderly Swiss couple next to me got up as soon as they sensed the film was ending. As the curtain over the exit closed behind them, I sat alone in the dark through the entirety of the credits, wiping the tears from my face. Maybe I was projecting a little (or a lot), but despite not having the full story in my head, I understood what it meant to be a kid stuck in the in-between, with tenuous connections to half-remembered places that are not quite home.
I checked to see if Nova would run again, but unfortunately I had caught the last screening of the film for the day. A little disappointed, I finally exited the theater, passing a looming, lonely potted plant on my way to the next space. The next room was brightly lit, furnished with chairs reminiscent of the ones I once saw in my a-gong’s apartment. I didn’t stop to sit down, though in retrospect I now wish I did. Instead, I stared at the photo on the wall, which featured the young man on a train, astronaut gear and all, asleep with his body slumped towards the window. Always transient and in transit. I stood and stared for a long time.
Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future is on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Gegenwart in Basel, Switzerland until October 11, 2026.
