Virtual realm

Over the past few decades, Cao has exhibited her works around the world, including a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London.

She calls the ongoing Shanghai show a midterm retrospective, looking back to retrieve her creative process and what concerned her at different points. "It is new, but it is also old … It is the footprints of the era," she says.

Many of the works on display at the exhibition are presented in multimedia, using photography, virtual reality and video games. An early explorer in the virtual realm known as the "metaverse", Cao has been working on multimedia art since the rise of the current generation of art consumers.

She says that this design is an epoch-making presentation compared to the Shanghai museum's past art exhibitions and has been accepted by more audiences after her nearly 30 years of multimedia creation and experimentation.

Since 2007, she has been mirroring the entire era into a digital millennium, constructing a series of virtual worlds. RMB City (2007-2022) is a wondrous and bustling immersive metropolis Cao built by using Second Life, an online role-playing game. Her own avatar, China Tracy, serves as the guardian spirit and head proprietress of the city, an adventurous, fearless, whimsical and dazzling digital presence.