Cao Fei Zones a Basel Museum Like a City: Seven Districts, No New Walls
Cao Fei and Small Production turn Kunstmuseum Basel's Gegenwart into a seven-district city with paint, floors, seats and signs. Closes 11 October 2026.
Until 11 October, eight days from today, Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart is not laid out as a gallery. Cao Fei and the Beijing studio Small Production have re-planned all four floors of the building as a walk-through city of seven districts: the Street, the Park, the Factories, the Cinema, the Playground, the Office and the Shelter. Cao Fei. Testimonies to the Near Future opened on 30 May 2026. The museum calls it her first solo exhibition in Switzerland and her largest survey in Europe to date. The curators are Stephanie Seidel, Philipp Selzer and Alice Wilke.
The vertical stack reads like a section through a town. VernissageTV’s walkthrough of 1 June lists it floor by floor: L1 holds the Hip Hop series and Cosplayers (2004); L2 carries 11.11 (2018), Asia One, Whose Utopia, Nova and La Town (2014); L3 holds DUOTOPIA, Oz (2022) and RMB City; L4 holds Isle of Instability (2020–2023) and the artist’s archive from 1995 to 2005.
This is cyberpunk without neon. Every district is built from a real place, and the plan holds it together.
The masterplan, read as a system
No new walls went in. The districts are made from four inputs, layered:
- Programme: works grouped by district rather than by date or medium.
- Ground: graffiti, skate ramps and road signs on the Street, astroturf in the Park, yellow fencing and caution tape in the Factories.
- Seating: it changes per zone, with animal-print seats in the Park.
- Wayfinding: oversized colour-coded signage in place of wall labels.
Srishti Ojha described the installation for STIRworld on 2 July, and her piece carries Seidel’s account of the method: “We changed the colours of the walls, the flooring, the seating.” Seidel also describes what it does to the visitor: “It’s not like you’re in a black box or a white cube on a regular museum bench, you’re already half a step in there.”
←TODAY: A Basel museum is zoned into seven districts using paint, floor finish, seats and signs.
→3012: Interiors are reprogrammed by changing surfaces, while the structure stays where it is.
Fulcrum: The cheapest layer of a building turns out to be the one that tells people where they are.
Three districts, three real places
Factories. Asia One (2018) is a 63-minute film set inside the JD.com logistics hub. As M+ Hong Kong describes it, the film follows “the facility’s only two human employees and their robotic assistant” in a place where work is almost completely automated. Those two workers are the protagonists, and the automation system is what the film examines. Whose Utopia (2006) sits nearby: assembly-line workers in a Pearl River Delta light-bulb factory perform their own dreams and talents.
Cinema. Nova (2019) is a 94-minute science-fiction film, listed by UCCA at 94’01”. It draws on the Hongxia Theatre in Beijing’s Jiuxianqiao district. According to the Serpentine Galleries, the first Chinese computer was invented in that district. The theatre closed in 2008, ahead of the Olympics. Cao Fei moved her studio into it in 2015, after her previous studio was demolished, and ran a five-year research project there.
Office. RMB City is the island city she built in Second Life as her avatar China Tracy. It has been open since January 2009, with a grand opening on 9–10 January. Its mayors rotated, beginning with Uli Sigg and continuing with Alan Lau, Jérôme Sans and Erica Dubach in January 2010. Grasshopper users will recognise the structure: one shared base model, many authors, and governance that passes from hand to hand.
The architect’s read
The show stages one idea at full scale: a city is a set of programmes linked by circulation and signage. PAZ’s Grid-Based Urban Design panel traces the same thinking from La Chaux-de-Fonds to Archigram’s Plug-in City, where the frame is permanent and the parts are swappable. In Basel the frame is a white cube and the swappable parts are surfaces.
The trade-off is plain. When the walls do not separate the districts, the signs carry the whole plan, and colour alone fails every visitor who cannot read colour. A robust zone pairs each hue with a name and a change of floor.
Atelier: Most offices hold an open floor that already behaves like a city without a plan: an AI corner, a model table and a quiet desk all bleed into each other. Cao Fei’s method shows that you can separate these programmes with surfaces rather than drywall. Monday move: tape out three named zones on your studio floor, give each one its own rug or mat, chair type and sign, and see after five working days whether people use the zones as places.
Hack: Generate a seven-district signage palette with evenly spaced hues, so that no two zones are close in colour. OKLCH keeps lightness and chroma constant, which means the hue is the only thing that changes, here in steps of about 51°. Paste the output straight into CSS or a Rhino layer table, and print each district name beside its swatch.
districts = ["Street","Park","Factories","Cinema","Playground","Office","Shelter"]
for i, d in enumerate(districts):
hue = round(i * 360 / len(districts))
print(f"{d:<11} oklch(78% 0.16 {hue})")Cao Fei told The Art Newspaper on 17 June: “The scenarios in many of my works have come true later.” The same piece notes that she works with the science-fiction writers Regina Kanyu Wang and Han Song. In this show, the scenario that has already come true is the plan itself. Take one floor you are responsible for and zone it into named districts using finish, seating and signs, without building a wall.
Sources & Further Reading
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