Cao Fei, a 29-year-old Guangzhou native, uses the much-heralded Second Life online world as an artistic medium. The user-generated virtual environment first inspired her video project i.Mirror, a Second Life documentary using screen captures of her digital avatar dubbed China Tracy. Cao Fei begins the sequence of videos with a quote taken from William J. Mitchell’s Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, “I construct, and I am constructed, in a mutually recursive process that continually engages my fluid, permeable boundaries and my endlessly ramifying networks. I am a spatially extended cyborg.” What follows is a surreal montage of dreamlike landscapes interlaced with fleeting relationships. Cao Fei calls it an illusion, but one dominated by youth, beauty, and money – something too well connected to reality and therein capable of transcending the many boundaries commonly placed between the digital and physical self.

Her newest project, RMB City, is also making waves in the international art circuit with its recent appearance at Art Basel in Miami and the Istanbul Biennial. Designed completely within Second Life, RMB City is a recreation of China’s social landscape in all its paradoxical glory. Giant panda’s hang from cranes while the Bird’s Nest stadium lies partially submerged off the island’s waterfront. Even Tiananmen Square has a swimming pool. Her manifesto explains, “RMB City… doesn’t restore the full present, nor does it recall our reminiscence of the past. It’s a mirror that partially reflects; we see where we were coming from, discover some of the ‘connections’ that fill the pale zone between the real and the virtual, the clues of which get disturbed, enriched, and polished.” Still, plots on the island are up for sale at prices only someone with Cao Fei’s clout could demand for cyber art. A European collector already secured his nook of virtual real estate for 100,000 Euros. Apparently participation comes at a price.

Second Life has drawn its fair share of praise as it blends formerly disparate modes of collective experience, but Cao Fei now promises to take it to a new level. RMB City, as a work of art, cannot be enjoyed outside a digital network. Its environment demands continual submersion into virtual spaces – liminal worlds fueled by self-expression and unfettered by social mores. For some it might continually erode their reality, but others find solace in the online worlds and continue to explore different aspects of the self as Cao Fei lives through China Tracy.