Charting a Changing World One Loss at a Time

When Cao Fei’s Beijing studio was demolished in 2015, the artist relocated to the disused Hongxia Theater: a mid-twentieth-century movie palace decorated in the drab style of the Sino-Soviet alliance, in which institutional pea-green tempers propaganda’s fiery red. At the entrance of her solo show at London’s Serpentine Galleries (her first in the UK), the Hongxia lobby was reproduced at full scale, complete with curving welcome desk. In vitrines, Cao Fei presented movie epheme