The Most Important Asian Art Show Right Now Is in Milan. It's About Drones.
Cao Fei just opened an exhibition that makes everything else in the conversation look timid.
The Temple Is Made of Fertiliser Bags
Dash opened April 9 at Fondazione Prada. It is the result of three years of fieldwork across farmlands in southern and northwestern China and Southeast Asia. Fondazione Prada The subject is smart agriculture. The actual subject is what happens to human knowledge when an algorithm replaces it.
On the ground floor: a grain warehouse, a farmer-training station, a banana plantation — and a temple constructed from fertiliser bags, inside which video screens show Southeast Asian farmers offering flowers and incense to their drones. AnOther
This is not a metaphor. It is documentary. In regions where harvests mean survival, anything involved in that survival acquires sacred weight. Cao Fei did not construct an ironic observation. She built an archive.
The Number That Makes It Urgent
Agricultural drones in China covered 173 million hectares in 2024 and generated roughly 13 billion yuan in market value. Let’s Data Science That is not a future scenario. That is already the operating reality of food production across the region that XIXI covers.
The knowledge that used to live in a farmer’s hands — seasonal rhythm, soil feel, the specific look of a crop that needs water — is being replaced by sensor data and satellite positioning. Cao Fei asks what that costs. Not economically. Epistemologically.
Why It Belongs Here
The VR component places the viewer inside the perspective of a discarded drone — already obsolete, already replaced, watching the field it used to tend from the outside. Sharp Magazine
That image is the most precise thing anyone has made about Asia’s technological acceleration in years. The drone that replaced the farmer is itself being replaced. The speed of obsolescence is the subject. And nobody doing it is being asked whether they are ready.