Cao Fei is a well-known Chinese artist in the world. With a combination of social commentary, pop culture, surrealism, and documentary filming, her works demonstrate a rapidly changing Chinese society. In 2006, during her almost six-month stay in a lighting factory in Foshan, Guangdong Province, an industrial city in southeast China, where Cao had close contact with 20 workers, she created Whose Utopia, a series of works including My Future Is Not a Dream.

Cao Fei, born in Guangzhou, known as “the factory in the world”, is familiar with the city’s distinctive traits. For this work, Cao put the workers’ longing for life and a factory dormitory, where they live every day together; or she let these workers play different roles in guarding their own small land like a ritual in this city constructed by steel and concrete. Though simply resulting from these workers’ unrealistic imagination, it serves as their only entertainment amid the real factory life. The truth is they have to strive for their own lives in a society with higher life expectations, sluggish economic growth and increasing exploitation of the bottom.

Mixed with poetic charm, humor, and bitterness, Cao’s works underline the collision between exciting fantasy and bleak reality and show the subtle relationship between romantic feelings and grey industrial production. Emotion is of significance in her works. She believes human beings are powerful existence. In this context, artists should express their ideas with people.

(Edited by Li Hanning & Yang Zhige, 2021)