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Inside Beijing-based artist Cao Fei’s virtual worlds at the ‘My City is Yours’ exhibition in Sydney

The retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is a cyber-city trip where reality meets the virtual in the glow of nostalgia

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Artist Cao Fei with Charlotte Lafont-Hugo, co-founder of Beau Architects, for the “My City is Yours” exhibition at Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photo: Diana Panuccio/Art Gallery of New South Wales

Published: 4:15pm, 28 Jan 2025

Long before the current manifestations of the metaverse, there was Second Life. Established as a virtual and collaborative space in 2003, Second Life had millions of visitors and, according to its developers, Linden Lab, an economy running into billions of US dollars. Since 2019 it has even had its own currency, the Linden Dollar.

In Second Life’s heyday, around 2006, films launched, law schools ran courses, multinational corporations opened branches, huge events took place, commercial and government organisations created hubs and their avatars spoke to our avatars.

Cao Fei (right) with Charlotte Lafont-Hugo, of Beau Architects, which designed the exhibition. Photo: Diana Panuccio/Art Gallery of New South Wales

Back then, an artist in her late 20s built a city in Second Life that she called RMB City. It had one permanent resident and a manifesto. The resident’s name was China Tracy and she lived, loved, worked and wrote there.

In her epigraph to the RMB City Manifesto, China Tracy quotes Italo Calvino’s 1973 work, The Castle of Crossed Destinies:

“Is this your city?” asked the young man.

The angel answered: “It’s yours.”

China Tracy is the creation and transcendent representation of Beijing-based artist Cao Fei, who is now fresh from a retrospective occupying a full floor of Shanghai’s Museum of Art Pudong, and with a new major retrospective, “My City is Yours”, showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia.