A Chinese World within Second Life
Cyber art proves profitable for pioneering Chinese artist.
Cao Fei, a young artist from Guangzhou in southern China, has created her own highly profitable piece of real estate in Second Life (SL) called “RMB City”. The cyber art island is a stylized take on China’s paradoxical social landscape, and has recently received rave reviews at the Art Basel in Miami and the Istanbul Biennial. One European collector has already procured his slice of RMB City real estate for a tidy 100,000 Euros. The RMB City project is on display at the Lombard-Freid Projects Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district until April 5th.
SL’s user-generated environment first inspired Cao Fei’s video project i.Mirror, a documentary using screen captures of her digital avatar known as China Tracy. The video is a surreal montage of dreamlike landscapes interlaced with fleeting relationships. Cao Fei calls it “an illusion, but one dominated by youth, beauty, and money – something too well connected to reality and therein capable of transcending the many boundaries commonly placed between the digital and physical self.”
The art scene in SL has steadily been gaining momentum, as artists and institutions set up shop in the virtual world, and RMB City, as a work of art, cannot be enjoyed outside a digital network. The upcoming Virtual Moves event is a series of four international art exhibitions held jointly in SL and at Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK) in Copenhagen, with the aim of exploring and challenging SL as a platform for artistic practice, a public space, and a cultural community, and to discuss critically how SL affects users’ notion of reality.
Image source: Tagging Art, New World News and Visions of Modernity