Cao Fei will bring more than two decades of virtual worlds, factory floors, avatars and speculative futures to London next spring, as Hayward Gallery presents the Chinese artist’s largest UK solo exhibition to date.
Opening 20th April 2027, the major survey will trace Cao Fei’s practice from the early 2000s to the present, bringing together landmark works including Whose Utopia (2006), RMB City (2007–2011) and Asia One (2018), alongside the UK premiere of her new work The Birth (2026).
Born in Guangzhou in 1978, Cao has spent much of her career looking at what happens when technological change collides with everyday life. Working across film, photography, virtual reality, video games and digital media, she has explored everything from China’s transformation into a global manufacturing centre and rapid urbanisation to online identity, automation, the Metaverse and artificial intelligence.
Her exhibitions frequently push those ideas out of the screen and into physical space, transforming galleries into factories, cinemas, arcades and other environments that blur distinctions between the real and virtual.
“My work has always responded to the times we live in: from China becoming the world’s factory, to urbanisation, the virtual world and artificial intelligence,”
Cao Fei says.
“These changes have profoundly reshaped how we live and perceive.”
The Hayward exhibition will unfold across five thematic chapters, with The Birth making its UK debut. The three-channel video installation takes the form of a woven, temple-like shrine constructed from fertiliser sacks, harvest props and decorative paper banners.
The work looks at the use of agricultural drones across China and Southeast Asia, bringing new farming technologies into dialogue with older rituals around harvests, incense and offerings. At its centre is a question that runs through much of Cao’s work: how humans might coexist with increasingly autonomous machines.
Elsewhere, Whose Utopia turns part of Hayward Gallery into a factory dormitory, complete with cardboard boxes and a cluttered bunk bed. Its film moves between footage of employees carrying out repetitive work in a lightbulb factory and dreamlike sequences in which those workers enact their private ambitions and desires.
Cao’s early Cosplayers (2004) will sit alongside one of her best-known digital projects, RMB City (2007–2011). Created using the online world Second Life, the latter saw Cao adopt the avatar China Tracy and invite participants around the world to help construct an imaginary metropolis.
Long before today’s conversations around the Metaverse became mainstream, RMB City was already asking what identity, community, architecture and authorship might look like when they migrated into virtual space.
Those questions continue in more recent work. In Meta-mentary (2022), Cao asks people where they think the Metaverse actually is and what it means to them, while Super Delivery (2024) turns the visitor into a participant in a playable work combining physical space with a Super Mario-style digital environment.
Hongxia (2019–2024), meanwhile, emerged from a period when Cao transformed an abandoned 1950s Beijing theatre into her studio. Combining virtual reality, film and installation, the project uses the building and its history to explore memory, gentrification and technological progress.
For Yung Ma, Senior Curator at Hayward Gallery, Cao’s ability to move between these worlds is central to the exhibition.
“Cao Fei’s art is a rich and expansive universe. It straddles immediate realities and speculative futures, unreservedly crossing boundaries between the real, the fantastical and the virtual,” he says. “It probes at the way we see the world and pushes how art and tech can transform each other.”
The exhibition also feels particularly well matched to Hayward Gallery’s Brutalist architecture: Cao’s virtual cities, industrial environments and technological futures will occupy one of London’s most uncompromisingly physical exhibition spaces.
Cao Fei, 20th April–25th July 2027
Hayward Gallery
Full price standard ticket: £19 Concessions available & Southbank Centre Members go free
About the artist
Cao Fei (b. 1978 in Guangzhou) currently lives and works in Beijing. She has exhibited extensively worldwide, including at some of the most prestigious museums such as MoMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her recent major solo exhibitions have been held at institutions such as Kunstmuseum Basel and Fondazione Prada in Milan (both 2026); Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai, Lenbachhaus in Munich and Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (all 2024); MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (both 2021); and Serpentine in London (2020). She has also participated in numerous biennials and triennials, including Venice, Sharjah, Sydney, Istanbul, Shanghai and Yokohama. Cao is a medallist of the inaugural Art Basel Awards in 2025 and a recipient of Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2021. She was also named one of the 100 most influential people of 2026 by Time Magazine this year.
