In Fondazione Prada's Podium, from 9 April to 28 September 2026, Cao Fei unfolds Dash: a multimedia inquiry that distils three years of fieldwork across the rice paddies of southern China, the desert margins of the north-west and the banana plantations of South-east Asia. More than an exhibition, it is a passage. Photography, video installation, virtual reality, archival documents and ritual objects coalesce into a layered portrait of smart agriculture — a phenomenon as decisive as it has been, until now, curiously absent from contemporary art discourse.
Today it is no longer enough to paint with a brush: you have to push beyond aesthetic value. It is a matter of past, present and future, but also of reality and virtuality. — Cao Fei
The itinerary
The journey begins on the ground floor, where the artist has built a full-scale imaginary rural landscape: a rice-granary tent that doubles as a cinema, a temple woven from fertiliser sacks, a working farmer's station, and a banana grove ringed by solar panels and smart machinery. Welcoming the visitor is Land Ceremony, shaped from Lombard rice and folk materials and embellished with drone components, which revives the ancient Chinese "rice dragon" rite. Inside the granary, across two screens, the forty-seven-minute video Dash plays on a loop: a complete agricultural cycle — from sowing to harvest — in which the fields mutate into precision laboratories. The VR piece Dash-180c then invites the viewer to slip into the gaze of a discarded drone, model 180c, reawakened by a young monkey in an abandoned service station: an uncanny reversal of perspective, poised between technological obsolescence and the return of the wild.
A historical and geological reading
Cao Fei's approach to smart agriculture is perhaps the exhibition's most valuable key. It is framed neither as plain progress nor as dystopian menace, but as a tectonic fracture redrawing millennial stratigraphies. Drones patrolling the paddies, algorithms calibrating irrigation, robots transplanting seedlings embody, on the surface, extraordinary efficiency; at the same time they erode the know-how sedimented across generations, setting in motion a vertiginous question about cultural continuity and the ecology of gesture. The artist layers different time scales — the geological time of the soil, the long span of peasant tradition, the hyper-accelerated tempo of the machine — and lets them rub against one another, offering no consoling mediation.
Philosophical and existential depth
The work reaches down into Cao Fei's Lingnan roots, where ancestors are not memory but active presence, and sacrificial rites stitch the living to their dead and to those not yet born. The human being is not conceived as master of the world but as one link in a genealogical chain binding every form of life. It is within this cosmology that the central question takes hold: what remains of the bond between humanity and land — woven over millennia from sacredness, knowledge and survival — when it is reconfigured at industrial speed and without genuine symbolic elaboration? Technology here is neither foe nor ally: it is a new pragmatic deity, to which small rites are still offered, almost as a way of holding on to something that is evaporating.
The economic dimension and the return to the countryside
On the economic plane, Dash illuminates without ideologising. The technological transformation of the Chinese countryside shifts the coordinates of farm labour: it lightens toil and raises yield, yet compresses the workforce, rewrites inherited knowledge and redefines the very value of the craft in the age of artificial intelligence. Alongside this, Cao Fei registers a countercurrent: the return to the countryside of many urbanised Chinese, worn out by metropolitan rhythms, seeking a more sustainable life and a possible reconciliation with the soil. A reflux that, in the new automated rural landscape, nonetheless takes on ambiguous contours — somewhere between nostalgia, ecological utopia and entrepreneurial opportunity. The countryside, once a place of roots, also becomes a start-up stage, a space of alternative welfare, even an existential refuge.
The artist herself has described the show as "a way of coming home": an autobiographical embroidery that evokes her parents' farming families and a childhood dissolved by industrialisation. What emerges is a dense, never Manichean meditation, capable of holding together the vertigo of the future and the gravity of memory. Dash is one of the most rigorous and subtly unsettling propositions of the Milanese season: vast in ambition, sharp in critical intelligence, and at last capable of bringing into contemporary art a theme that is reshaping the planet.
However optimistic we may be about the future of technology, it is rooted in cybernetics, in the interaction between technique and the human being. On one side technology serves humanity; on the other it controls its behaviour. — Cao Fei
Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, 20139 Milan
9 April – 28 September 2026 Daily 10:00 – 19:00 (closed on Tuesdays); ticket desk open until one hour before closing —
Getting there: metro M3 (yellow line), Lodi T.I.B.B. stop; tram 24, via Ripamonti / via Lorenzini stop; bus 65, Largo Isarco stop Bookshop, Bar Luce (designed by Wes Anderson), café and Torre restaurant
