Dash by Cao Fei at Fondazione Prada

Dash unfolds from Cao Fei’s long-term research. Over the past three years, the artist has immersed herself in farmlands across southern and northwestern China, as well as Southeast Asia, observing and interpreting the emergence of smart agriculture.

Overview

Fondazione Prada presents Dash, a new multimedia project devised by Chinese artist Cao Fei for its Milan venue combining multiple languages ranging from photography to video installation, from virtual reality to documentary footage, and archival material, to trace a complex portrait of a global agricultural technological revolution and its inherent contradictions.

Currently, global and Chinese agriculture, particularly, is confronting multiple severe challenges: extreme weather caused by climate change, constraints on grain yield growth due to water scarcity, and the exacerbation of the “agricultural labor shortage” issue by rural population outflow. This project reflects on how technology enhances efficiency, reduces labor, and safeguards food security amid climate uncertainty and rural aging. It also explores how algorithms are displacing traditional knowledge, reshaping human-land relationships, and changing rural-urban dynamics, raising concerns about ecology, employment, and cultural continuity.

As stated by Cao Fei, “This exhibition invites viewers to step into a contemporary agricultural archaeological site, where multiple temporal dimensions intertwine. It is not a pastoral idyll of technology, but an archaeological gaze upon ‘agriculture as geological engineering.’ Here, satellite positioning systems converse with ritual geographies; artificial intelligence and traditional experience train one another; historical images and sensor signals generate visual resonance. Together, these objects and images form a chronicle of technological artifacts— at once tools of production and carriers of time—continually reconfiguring the biopolitics of the land across the vast gradients of human history.”

Marking a seminal extension of Cao Fei’s more than two-decade-long inquiry into the human condition amid technological transformation, Dash shifts focus from industrial and logistical spaces of earlier works, such as Whose Utopia (2006) and Asia One (2018), to agriculture, the bedrock of human civilization. With her new project, Cao Fei invites the audience to reflect on pressing contemporary questions: How do we redefine the value of labor in an artificial intelligence age? What possibilities exist for technology-human and technology-nature coexistence? And how might we repair humanity’s most ancient spiritual bonds with land, tradition, and belief on a global scale? The project seeks to move beyond the linear narrative of “humans dominating technology and technology transforming nature,” instead posing a different question: now that technology is deeply embedded in lived experience, can we reimagine a new contemporary form of unity between Cosmos, Human, and Technics?