  ao Fei is playing games. She dresses up her actors in costumes, like some Japanese anime character. They prance about the big city, wielding a knife and black stockings. In her artistic films, her hometown of Guangzhou seems to be stuck between two worlds, one primitive and one post-modern. She creates heroes and villains, on film, in video and in costume. She writes for the theatre, confusing observers about whether she's in this world for art, or dreaming of some other world, and simply selling her fantasies to those who will buy into them.
But she is an artist, and a very good one, according to a growing band of art critics. At 28, she's been named one of China's most promising young artists by a group of distinguished artists, collectors and curators. That distinction came last May, when she won the Young Artist's Prize for 2006 from the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards, which was juried by a distinguished group that included the Swiss collector Uli Sigg and the artist Ai Wei Wei.
The New York Times has declared that this costumed artist has promise that is "indisputable." And the curator Hans Ulrich-Obrist says the young supergirl "has developed an expansive oeuvre of theatrical performance, photography, writing, sound pieces, short film and even a feature length production" that reminds him of a young Robert Rauschenberg.
What do these people see? They seem to be embracing a new kind of artist for China, one who is born into a more affluent, rising country, a booming economy -- a very different kind of artist from those born during China's brutal Cultural Revolution.
 Yesterday, artists howled on canvas, and painted darkness and disfigurement. They made installations that twisted symbols, and reinvented them in a chaotic yet mesmerizing way.
Today, young artists are born into a digital world, and they are trying to grasp its complexities on film, on the computer screen and in multimedia fashion.
For China, this is the first generation of children born in a televised, digital age. And they are first generation to come of age with international exposure and easy access to the outside world, the MTV generation of America and the anime fanatics of Japan.
Reality and fantasy are one in the same. Or are they? Where is hyper growth taking us?
Cao Fei seems to be trying to cope with some of these questions with a multimedia assault on the senses. In her wild 2003 video, "Rabid Dogs," Burberry-clad office workers bark like dogs. In "Cosplay" (2006), young people dressed up as Japanese anime characters dance around in the fields of Guangzhou unsure of whether they are part of the game consoles that China may be exporting to the rest of the world, or just temporarily confused about the pace of change in the world.
 This is undoubtedly a new step for China. The art movement seems to be rushing toward video, film, installation and theatre -- though theatre has come and gone as a vehicle for art works. But for some reason, painting doesn't seem to be winning over the young generation. They seem more eager to digitally enhance photographs, or to magically alter the universe into something obscene, playful and even self indulgent.
Hans Ulrich-Obrist says Cao Fei is a key member of this new generation of artists. And like Yang Fudong, Xu Zhen, Chi Peng and Kan Xuan, she seems bent on breaking the rules. She seems both inventor and explorer, Obrist says of a young artist who seems to be playing out some fairy tale. In a country where new artists seem to be minted by the second, Cao Fei is hot.
She's taken her works to more than 10 countries in the past few years, to the United States, France, Spain, Japan, Holland and Australia, to name a few. And her artistic mediums are versatile: video, conceptual photography, installation and experimental theatre.
What do the critics secretly say? Some say she is over-rated. They say her works are those of a young woman who plays games and calls it art, which means video game players, kids acting out, and all manner of fantasy players are also promising young artists. And they say, how do you collect and curate these new types of fantasies?
 But some of the leading art experts, those who drive media coverage and determine exhibition space, call Cao Fei a rising star on the art scene. And that's why she's in demand. Last May, after winning the Young Artist's Prize in Beijing, she flew to Australia for the Sydney Biennale. Then she shuttled off to Shanghai for a solo exhibition at the Zhu Qi Zhan Art Musuem. Now, she's back in Shanghai again, during the Biennale week, as part of an exhibition featuring the winner of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards, in a show also hosted by the Zendai Art Museum.
Cao Fei has just moved to Beijing. But she got here start located far from Beijing, the traditional art capital, and Shanghai, where a new generation of digital artists are now gathering. Yet being located in Guangzhou has not isolated Cao. Guangzhou has transformed itself into a major art center in recent years, in part because of the Guangzhou Triennial, which has been presided over by one of the country's leading curators, Hou Hanru, who's now in San Francisco.
Cao Fei was born in Guangzhou and grew up in a family that had at least one other artist: her older sister. Her parents worked at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art and its affiliated middle school. And so art seem a natural path for her too.
In middle school, she says she participated in theatre and also shot experimental short films on campus. She said in a recent interview, that her earliest work was about campus life, filled with the spirit of rebellion, but the rebels had no clear direction. Later, she attended the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, and graduated in 2000 with a bachelor's degree in studio art.
Even before she finished college, several experts say that Hou Hanru had already selected her as a promising young artist. And before long she was producing. Her five-minute film, "Chain" (2000) was an attempt to see deep inside herself in a private way.
 Hou Hanru, the critic, says Cao Fei's childhood was filled with music videos, pop music and television shows from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Pirated VCDs and DVDS introduced her to film makers like Pedro Almodovar. And she says, her earliest ideas were to explore the relationship between art and reality, and art and religion.
"I am nourished by theatre, film and then contemporary art," she says. "After I touched contemporary art, I began to learn from it and knew how to create contemporary art works."
She says she is also concerned about social change, economic development models, urbanism and other social issues, particularly those impinging on the booming Pearl River Delta area, that has been radically transformed during her lifetime into the world's factory floor, and a region of massive real estate construction and newfound wealth.
Some of that influence can be seen in one of her latest works, "SIEMENS: Art Project: What are they doing?" In the piece, she uses installation materials, sound projection, raw materials from Siemens factories and live performance to illustrate the lives of young workers who migrate to the Pearl River Delta looking for higher paying jobs. She even creates little windows, like the dormitory rooms of so many migrant workers who spend just a few years toiling for as little as $125 a month.
The film accompanying the installation begins like a documentary, it catologues all the machinery, the movements -- the heart of the factory. Then workers appear. And eventually, the play out their fantasies, right on the factory floor -- break dancing down the aisles, imitating one of China's greatest dancers, Yang Liping, in dark corners filled with boxes, and playing the guitar.
This is, she says, part of her effort to make her art fit the reality of life. And now, the woman known for her costumes and her fantasy games, is taking on the real life of the migrant worker. Indeed, for six months she worked with a research group, interviewing factory workers and doing research at the Guangdong Foshan Osram Company, a German lighting manufacturer. When the research was completed they edited a newspaper called the "Daily Utopia" to record the whole process.
 In that way, it's not so easy to classify Cao Fei, or the understand the path she might take next. She seems eager to cross genders, cultural, geographic and linguistic boundaries, and to try to express herself through different mediums. She says she doesn't want to put restrictions on her art. Her next film, she says, is set in southwestern China's Yunnan Province, one of the country's most ethnically diverse regions.
"It is good to express with every medium," she says. But her work is not by any means all serious. In fact, it's playful, humorous and even a little pop.
She shot a film called "Hip Hop," which took three years to make and involved traveling to three different cities. Many of her actors are not professional. They simply act out hip hop scenes; an old woman and a construction worker dance to hip hop music on a Guangzhou street; townspeople from Fukuoka, Japan nod and rock their bodies to a blend of hip hop and Japanese traditional music. Chinese office workers comically attempt hip hop like gestures to a on the streets of New York's Chinatown.
Cao Fei says there's something universal about hip hop culture despite its uniquely American origins in the African-American community. She believes this dance form expresses the rougher side of suffering hidden behind it's casual surface.
In her film, "CosPlayer," which comes from the Japanese subculture games called "costume play," Cao Fei's actors dress up like a Japanese animation character. In the video, the main character in the video shuttles between high-rise building and large mansions, or sits at home in strange costumes.
 Many of the scenes appear absurd and meaningless. The artists says that this partly explains the generation that grew up in the last 30 years of the 20th century. Influenced heavily by all forms of media, they pulled in Japanese animation and imported comics; they feel lost and powerless in the real world, and more at home in their imaginary worlds.
In some ways, Cao Fei is creating art and being shaped by the same things that are reshaping Japan and Korea youths. China, a rising power, is suddenly finding its youth are lost and confused by the sweeping changes. And in some ways, like American youths too, they are choosing to retreat into themselves. Americans often seem to blow off steam, to drink and indulge outwardly, as a way to cope with the pressures of the modern world. Asian youths, perhaps like so many Japanese anime lovers and now young Chinese, seem to turn inward, toward fantasy and play.
In "Cosplayers," the characters fight mock battles. They duel and stare each other down. Then they head home, still dressed in their costumes, but seemingly back in the real world, unaware of which generation they belong to.
Cao Fei seems to be saying her generation is lost by the pace of change and the affluence, by the gravity of globalization. So the female character sits at home, wearing a cape, unsure of where the demons are, but certain that this must be art for the new world -- from a generation that is constantly told to fantasize -- and then, to get back to work.
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