Cao Fei‘s performance/video/installation for the global Siemens Arts Programme in Foshan, What Are You Doing Here? opens today. There’s a bus from the 广州美术学院 Guangzhou Academy of fine Arts at 1520.
Cao Fei’s “What are you doing here?”
Oct 2005 – Apr 2006
OSRAM China Lighting Ltd., Foshan, Guangdong ProvinceOSRAM China Lighting and Siemens Arts Program asked the artist Cao Fei to conceive an art project for the Foshan site.
For this purpose, she distributed questionnaires to the employees, inviting them to express their personal feelings, wishes, anxieties, career goals and expectations. Afterwards she worked intensively with 35 employees to translate these intangibles into artistic form. She divided the employees into five groups, each of which focused on one of the following themes: “Future”, “Dreams”, “Reality”, “Home City” and “Visions”. Expressed as drawings and sketches, their ideas will be initially incorporated into a lighting installation, which will be followed by a collaboratively conceived performance and a video.
Cao Fei‘s art repeatedly reflects on the social relationship between the individual and that individual’s professional surroundings. Against the background of globalization, she devotes particular attention to social changes occurring in the Pearl River Delta, which is also the location of the headquarters of OSRAM China Lighting Ltd.
“What are they doing here?” is a project series run by Siemens Arts Program.
