Aside from her incredible creations on Second Life, Cao has extraordinary talents with Rumbas and synthetic farm animals.

I mean how does one get two fake baby chicks and a robot vacuum make you really feel things. You know the chicks aren’t real and yet a overwhelming childlike glee overtakes you at the thought of baby chickens riding a Rumba. For $2,600, this artwork and the initial joy that comes with it could be yours. But soon that happiness dies as you learn that Cao Fei’s artworks all has one thing in common: “They are about how an individual faces or confronts the larger society, a formidable system, be it a global market society or the establishment of a nation-state, and what forms we adopt in order to participate in society.”

So now you could interpret this piece to mean that we, as humans, are just helpless chicks pushed mindlessly forward by a society (Rumba) that has no feeling or meaning whatsoever. The optimist in you will argue, “But Rumba’s do have meaning! They are meant to clean.” But anyone who has actually owned a Rumba knows that they are essentially useless at cleaning. So if we are just little chicks and this heartless machine is our incubator, as the title suggests, what does that mean for the nurturing of humanity as a whole? The answer is nothing good.

A video of Rumba 1: Incubator (for Parkett no. 99) in action (yes, the Rumba in the piece is fully functioning) is readily available on YouTube and could be considered the cat video of art pieces. It’s fun at the time but if watched for several consecutive hours will likely lead to an existential crisis about the control internet culture has over our minds and bodies. But that doesn’t stop us from loving it. Everyone loves watching mindless videos on Youtube. It’s a fundamental layer in the foundation of our society, which is exactly what Cao Fei points out to us...but does not exactly discourage. As Cao Fei points out, “I think the theme of the century is that we are entering a ‘no man’s land’, our existences filled with driverless cars and aeroplanes, and virtual reality." BRB going to watch more cat videos.