Cold Pop-Cao Zaifei's Romanticism

On February 24th, 2023, the new exhibition "Cold Pop - The Romanticism of Cao Zaifei" at Guardian Yoo Ai Art Center officially opens to the public, as the opening of the new year, curated by Hao Qingsong, the exhibition is centered around two themes: "Absurd" and "Romantic". The exhibition centers on the two themes of "absurdity" and "romance", displaying more than 100 pieces of paintings, videos and installations created by the artist Cao Zaifei in recent years, especially during the epidemic.

Artist Cao Zaifei graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Nanjing Art Institute and the Department of Philosophy and Religion of Nanjing University, and is now a visiting scholar at Purdue University in the U.S. He currently teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts of Shanghai University. In recent years, his performance art of reading love poems in the dating corner has attracted much attention on social media platforms. He has never followed the trend of Chinese contemporary art, but insists on his own artistic path according to his own artistic judgment.

The term "Cold Pop" in the theme of this exhibition is refreshing. Pop art, meaning popular art and pop art, emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States since the 1960s, with Andy Warhol as its representative, ushering in the era of consumer art, also known as the age of images, and in the 1990s, a combination of pop art and red light art emerged in China, known as political pop art, which represents a unique face of Chinese contemporary art. Nowadays, at the turning point of contemporary art, consumer art seems to be heading towards the end of art, but the images and spirit of Pop have not disappeared. According to curator Hao Qingsong, Cao Zaifei has taken over the image methodology of British and American consumerist pop art, retained the ironic logic of political pop art, and moved the spirit of pop from passionate hallucination to rational intervention, which is "cold pop".