Cao Fei: Dash

Fondazione Prada will present Dash, a new multimedia project devised by Chinese artist Cao Fei for its Milan headquarters, from 9 April to 28 September 2026. 

In close collaboration with Fondazione Prada, Dash unfolds from Cao Fei’s long-term research. Over the past three years, Cao Fei has immersed herself in farmlands across southern and northwestern China, as well as Southeast Asia, observing and interpreting the emergence of smart agriculture. Combining multiple languages ranging from photography to video installation, from virtual reality to documentary footage, and archival material, the artist traces a complex portrait of a global agricultural technological revolution and its inherent contradictions.

Currently, global and Chinese agriculture, particularly, is confronting multiple severe challenges: extreme weather caused by climate change, constraints on grain yield growth due to water scarcity, and the exacerbation of the “agricultural labor shortage” issue by rural population outflow. This project reflects on how technology enhances efficiency, reduces labor, and safeguards food security amid climate uncertainty and rural aging. It also explores how algorithms are displacing traditional knowledge, reshaping human-land relationships, and changing rural-urban dynamics, raising concerns about ecology, employment, and cultural continuity.

As stated by Cao Fei, “This exhibition invites viewers to step into a contemporary agricultural archaeological site, where multiple temporal dimensions intertwine. It is not a pastoral idyll of technology, but an archaeological gaze upon ‘agriculture as geological engineering.’ Here, satellite positioning systems converse with ritual geographies; artificial intelligence and traditional experience train one another; historical images and sensor signals generate visual resonance. Together, these objects and images form a chronicle of technological artifacts—at once tools of production and carriers of time—continually reconfiguring the biopolitics of the land across the vast gradients of human history.”

Marking a seminal extension of Cao Fei’s more than two-decade-long inquiry into the human condition amid technological transformation, “Dash” shifts focus from industrial and logistical spaces of earlier works, such as Whose Utopia (2006) and Asia One (2018), to agriculture, the bedrock of human civilization. With her new project, Cao Fei invites the audience to reflect on pressing contemporary questions: How do we redefine the value of labor in an artificial intelligence age? What possibilities exist for technology-human and technology-nature coexistence? And how might we repair humanity’s most ancient spiritual bonds with land, tradition, and belief on a global scale? The project seeks to move beyond the linear narrative of “humans dominating technology and technology transforming nature,” instead posing a different question: now that technology is deeply embedded in lived experience, can we reimagine a new contemporary form of unity between Cosmos, Human, and Technics?

The project unfolds on the ground floor and first floor of the Podium, the central exhibition space of the Fondazione Prada’s compound, as a multi-layered, dialectical narrative interweaving the virtual and the real in a complex set designed by Small Production. Taking a Chinese agritech company’s ecosystem as a case study, the artist traces its entire technological permeation process and a complex portrait of “agricultural techno-globalization.” In 2021, Cao Fei had a fortuitous encounter with XAG, a world-leading agricultural robotics company rooted in Guangzhou. Over the past three years, she has followed XAG’s footsteps to numerous farms across China and Southeast Asia. She documented not only the role of technologies such as agricultural drones and AI algorithms in improving agricultural efficiency and ensuring food security, but also the integration of tradition and modernity.

On the ground floor of the Podium, Cao Fei will create an immersive environment combining several structures and areas that include a grain warehouse, a new farmer station, a temple, and a small banana plantation surrounded by smart agricultural equipment, solar energy panels, and screens. These real-scale structures will host video and virtual reality installations.

Cao Fei’s new video work, titled Dash and produced by Fondazione Prada on the occasion of this project, will be displayed on two screens inside the grain warehouse environment. As underlined by art critic Yang Beichen in his essay included in the exhibition catalogue, “In Dash, we can clearly sense the artist’s attempt to register the distinctive rhythms of machines, their energy transformations and feedback mechanisms. Across the split screens, the same dynamic keeps surfacing over and over again: people operate the machines, and in doing so, hand over parts of their own physiological and cognitive rhythms, resulting in a kind of mutual tuning. The drone, with its algorithms and visual system, is no longer just a device at humans’ disposal, but becomes part of a ‘cognitive assemblage.’ As the new farmers interact with the machine through interfaces, remote control, and data flows, they progressively cede elements of their own thinking, such as perception, spatial imagination, and risk assessment. This amounts to a form of ‘cognitive offloading,’ a cognitive symbiosis that borders on the mediumistic.”

A tent woven from fertilizer bags will serve as a temple-like structure to host a three-channel looping video and a set of harvest-related props. This multimedia installation, titled The Birth, will stage the internal paradoxes embedded in drones as standardized products of the assembly line within the technological production chain. The artist’s inspiration derives from agricultural research conducted in Southeast Asia and references the everyday practices of local farmers offering and worshipping drones. The evolution of technological tools has not altered people’s simple prayers for a bountiful harvest.

Dash-180c is a virtual reality game installation surrounded by artificial banana trees. Visitors will adopt the subjective perspective of a discarded agricultural drone, model 180c, in a futuristic scenario in which a technological revolution completely transformed agriculture and human civilization.

On the first floor of the Podium, a series of documentaries, video interviews, photographs, slides, film posters, books, and other archive documents will be displayed in different structures designed to host reading rooms, libraries, and screening rooms. The historical documents, including photos, posters, films and novels, will focus on narratives related to agriculture from various periods of development, spanning from the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the 1980s. This section will feature a set of scientific and educational slides from the Reform and Opening-up policy era (beginning in 1978) to understand the foundational role of agriculture and highlight that agricultural development was a crucial pathway for national construction in the new era.

Alongside historical documents, this exhibition section will feature video works, installations, and the Conceptual diagram CHT Triad: Cosmos, Human, Technics created by the artist on the occasion of this project. The video works will include the documentaries Super Farms and Southward Journey, and the series of interviews, comprising Land Debate, conducted with scholars, academics, and experts in smart agriculture. The installation Land Ceremony is inspired by the Chinese traditional “rice dragon” ritual handed down over millennia to invoke a bountiful harvest.

These works and materials will guide visitors through the long-term research process Cao Fei traced for this project. In this context, they will have the opportunity to explore urgent issues derived from the development of smart farming in China, including the complex interplay between traditional Chinese philosophies and religions, and the new worldview forged by automation and drone technology, prompting a re-examination of foundational values in the age of intelligent machines.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated book conceived by graphic designer and artist Evi O and published by Fondazione Prada. It features an introduction by Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada, a conversation between Cao Fei and Rem Koolhaas, who has developed with OMA an extensive research on countryside since 2012, a science fiction story by the artist, and a series of interviews and essays with or by scholars, curators and experts.