At 39, Cao Fei is the youngest artist ever to create a BMW Art Car, so it stands to reason that her Art Car #18 would blend multiple forms of media. Known also for questioning the lines separating mental, physical, and digital existence, Fei used a BMW M6 GT3 race car as an element in a virtual artistic experience.
Based in Beijing and born in Guangzhou, Fei is the first Chinese artist to work on a BMW Art Car. Educated at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Fei has had works in the MoMA PS1 and Guggenheim museums in New York City, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. During the three years it took to create her work, Fei went to a racing event in Switzerland and interacted with driver Cyndie Allemann, took a tour of the BMW plant in Tiexi, China, visited BMW headquarters, and worked with BMW engineers and designers for educational and inspirational purposes.
The BMW M6 GT3 racer follows last year’s M6 GTLM exhibit. The car, although a piece of art in itself, is dressed in bare matte carbon that acts as a blank canvas and can easily be incorporated into a colorful virtual world. The other two components of the display are video about a “time-traveling spiritual practitioner and an augmented reality full of rainbow lights” that can be seen through an app for iPhone or iPad.
“To me, light represents thoughts,” Fei said. “As the speed of thoughts cannot be measured, the #18 Art Car questions the existence of the boundaries of the human mind. We are entering a new age, where the mind directly controls objects and where thoughts can be transferred, such as unmanned operations and artificial intelligence. Which attitudes and temperaments hold the key to opening the gateway to the new age?”
“In the increasingly digitalized world, technology has become an important means for artists to create,” Fan Di’an, president of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, said in a statement. According to BMW, the swirls of light above and around the car call on a traditional spiritual blessing ceremony for good luck. The number 18 is also considered good luck in Chinese culture, the automaker said.
Fei’s exhibit made its debut earlier this week at the Minsheng Art Museum in Beijing and will be on display at the BMW Experience in Shanghai and at the UBS Forum during Art Basel in Switzerland in June. Like other BMW art projects, though, it’s not just a stationary piece. It will be put to the test when Augusto Farfus, who also raced last year’s BMW Art Car, takes it to the track in the FIA GT World Cup in Macau in November.
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