Everyday Miracles

Using the venue of the Petrol Warehouse (Cistern Building) in a radically discreet way, Kan Xuan shows a selection of her most significant video works on flat screen monitors and projections. Starting with "Kan Xuan! -Ai!", this series includes "Countdown," " A Persimmon," "Object," "Garbage," "100 Times," "A Happy Girl" and "Or Everything!" In it, she constructs a kind of labyrinth of light and sound that entices the visitors to enter a mysterious world in which one is surprised by alchemical moments of gazes on the everyday, from the most banal objects to nothingness. At the end of the tunnel, one would encounter a kind of enlightenment, like facing a "Kong An"!

Cao Fei, born in Guangdong in 1978, is the youngest but the most versatile in the group. Working with video, photography, performance, experimental theatre, documentary and fictional films, writing and other media, she vividly express the intense experiences of a young generation of Chinese urban youth navigating the wave of modernisation, urbanisation and globalisation. With an incredibly fresh but vigilant sense of humour, she examines and makes visible the very realities and dreams of this generation in various contexts from work to play, from suffering to happiness. Today, she garners a great deal of admiration from the international professionals in the art world. She has been presented in the Venice Biennale 2003, 2nd Guangzhou Triennial and Sydney Biennale 2006.

Thousands of youngsters are deeply addicted to the virtual world created on the internet. The immensely popular online game "Second Life" provides them with a "3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents." It offers "a truly collaborative, immersive and open-ended entertainment experience, where together people create and inhabit a virtual world of their own design." In this new world, all people are the nation's "inhabitants," there are no "countries" or "regions," but only a digital world generated by imagination and creativity. Naming her avatar China Tracy, Cao Fei is building up an on-line project for the Chinese Pavilion to carry out an adventure into this virtual world that is exerting crucial influence on our perception of the real and thus considerably modifying our social relationships. Creating a China Tracy Pavilion on the website, Cao Fei will construct a platform for dialogue and exchange open to everyone. Venturing into this imminent future, this project will definitely bring the Chinese Pavilion itself to a much more global perspective.