For 25 years the artist has been interested in dystopias, utopias and alternative futures, harnessing video, performance, immersive installation and digital media to portray the politics of our ‘liquid society’, in which the boundary between the virtual world and material world is ever more porous. Her subject has always been the rapidly evolving landscape of China, but the issues she raises apply equally to elsewhere. She says that in a world of AI ‘art used to be ahead of public understanding, but now audiences are evolving alongside technology’. While keenly engaged with that technology, Cao’s interest lies in the alienation and dwindling empathy such advances can engender; a very human touch made clear in a new work for her retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a homage to her sister Cao Xiaoyun, also an artist, and Xiaoyun’s experiences as an immigrant in Sydney prior to her death two years ago. Cao Fei has suggested this year that anti-Chinese bias is at play in dwindling US appearances, but elsewhere she closed a show at MALBA in Buenos Aires in February, and will have a survey at Kunstmuseum Basel next year.