At Miami in December at the Art Positions fair, the Chinese artist Cao Fei sold a work to a private collector for $100,000.
This art was wasn't a painting nor a sculptor. It was not even a short video that Ms. Cao is known for. Rather all that money bought a piece of virtual real estate in the online world Second life.
Second Life (abbreviated as SL) is an Internet-based 3D virtual world launched June 23, 2003 and developed by Linden Research, Inc.
Second life has been other reality for Internet user since 2003, which allows them to travel and live as a avatars, owning land, building homes and buying and selling goods. This has been so popular that creator, Linden says that more than 20-million users accounts are registered for employment interviews, training sessions and sales meetings.
Now museums and galleries are also into this. More than 1,000 art galleries operate in Second life. The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Calif.,the Newseum, an interactive museum of news in Washington, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York has also co-presented a Second Life show.In Second life visitors have fun with exhibition; it not just only about looking at art work and reading labels. This is kind of very interactive; avatars talking, walking or flying in space.
Ms. Cao is part of wave of artists working in this new medium. She went on the site and was excited about imaginative ideas and she says in the interview from Beijing, "I was curious at first about this world, but I learned to navigate the space and then started to have fun, before being attracted by a variety of residents, new types of community, entertainment facilities and business models. I then tried to live a life completely different from my real one.”
The final outcome was "i.Mirror," her second life avatar. “It is a sort of documentary,” Ms. Cao said. “I captured video of the experience as it happened online, then edited it down to create a feature story. Nothing was scripted.”
Ms. Cao started her career making short films and videos that combined aspects of fantasy and real life documentary. One of her example was "Rabid Dogs" a video in 2002, which showed Burberry-clad office workers crawling on the floor and growling like dogs. After this she became a fixture on international art scene, where she showed her videos and photographs in more than 100 group exhibitions.
“She’s been an art star in China for nearly 10 years,” said Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York. “As she’s gained international experience, she’s grown in confidence and ambition, zooming from project to project without missing a beat.”
Her debut in Miami continued to exist a resident in Second Life, where she is building a virtual city as an ironic look at the pace of construction and change in China. It is called RMB City, the title an abbreviation of renminbi, China’s currency, also known as the yuan. It will denote the characteristics of Chinese cities, with new fantasy with virtual version of famous Chinese buildings and landmarks, like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square.
To cover Web-design costs for the online building project, which is expected to take two years, the artist is selling off virtual real estate, with prices as high as $120,000 for a structure. For RMB City’s New York gallery debut, Ms. Cao has transformed Lombard-Freid Projects in Chelsea into a real estate office. Photographs of bits of prime virtual real estate surround the gallery walls. The artist also plans to open a real-life office in Beijing to help sell her virtual real estate.
This artwork is taking us to the different world all together!!
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/arts/artsspecial/12second.html
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