Find humanity in a surreal high-tech city with Cao Fei

At the entrance to the Art Gallery of NSW's major summer show stands a towering octopus and an archway built from scaffolding, lit with a neon title - Cao Fei: My City is Yours.

It's an invitation from the influential Chinese artist to step inside her lively artistic metropolis - a place built on imagination, technology, and nostalgia.

Beijing-based Cao was born in 1978 in the southern city of Guangzhou.

Her rise as an artist has paralleled China's own breakneck urbanisation, with her work reflecting on this rapid development and the rise of digital technology.

Cao's first solo exhibition in Australia is a series of installations designed as a city split into districts, including a factory and a central plaza - there's even a play area with a giant pit of foam blocks.

The show is very different to anything the gallery has done before, according to director Michael Brand, with the new second building providing capacity to stage large-scale immersive exhibitions.

The artist explained she provides seating (from cane chairs to yoga balls) to help people can absorb the show.

"I think about people - how to sit around, to rest and look at the world," she told AAP.

"That's why my city is yours, it's breaking the boundary of the audience and the artwork."

Key works dating back to the 1990s are on display, including early videos of Cosplayers shot on camcorder, as well as RMB City, a pioneering artwork of a virtual city built inside the online platform Second Life.

In another video, young people explain what they would change about themselves in a virtual world.

"I would be a king," says one. "Maybe I will become a logo, a plastic bag," says another.

While Cao asks questions for the digital age, there is much that speaks to Sydney and the city's Chinese diaspora.

Among her new works is a re-imagination of Sydney's Marigold Restaurant, a popular Yum Cha destination that closed in 2021.

This, along with a tribute to Beijing's now-closed Hongxia Theatre, is an attempt to repair the fracturing of collective experience wrought by technology.

"Even in the cinema, we had 1000 people watching one film, but today we have Netflix, we have YouTube," the artist said.

"We had the same experience in the past, but now we all have phones we are isolated."

A new project, Golden Wattle, is dedicated to the artist's late sister Cao Xiaoyun, who migrated to Sydney and died in 2022.

It's house shaped installation, the first room filled with a dozen of Cao Xiaoyun's pencil drawings, and the second a living room with a television and photo album.

It's a moving tribute and a sanctuary from the noise outside, suggesting that in a world of rapidly changing technology, humanity persists in genuine emotion for those we hold close.

So how are humans to cope in a world of ever increasing upheaval? It's a problem for everyone, not just artists, said Cao Fei.

"Everyone is facing the same question, but I'm lucky to have art to express myself, to use different techniques to express this concept," she said.

Occasionally she catches people at her exhibitions expressing themselves too.

"Sometimes I can see the audience dancing, or like butterflies flying, especially the young people," she said.

Cao Fei: My City is Yours is at the Art Gallery of NSW's Naala Badu building until April 13.

AAP travelled with the assistance of the Art Gallery of NSW.