Wallpaper November 2021

This Art Special with a 20-page portfolio of stills and exclusive behind-the-scenes photography from her recent works Nova (2019) and Asia One (2018); respectively, the tale of a scientist who accidentally sends his son into a virtual limbo, and a disquieting vision of an industrial facility of the near future in which robots have replaced human workers. Beyond their resonances with the present moment, the films have an alluring beauty that gives an odd but welcome glimmer of hope. As our Singapore editor Daven Wu writes in his profile of the artist, ‘while Cao’s work is streaked with the constant theme of gloomy dystopia, it is also firmly balanced by a sense of impermanence – in the positive sense that, whatever else may be troubling us, it won’t last’. In the same sense, her limited-edition cover for the issue, which reflects on a post-Covid world, also offers a subtle suggestion that better days lie ahead.