RMB City

Chinese artist Cao Fei, AKA China Tracy, has an exhibition of her Second Life installation RMB City at Lombard Freid Projects in New York from February 29th to April 5th, 2008.

RMB City is an installation created by China Tracy in Second Life, a parody of contemporary Chinese culture - a giant panda swinging on a crane counterweighted by OMA's CCTV building, for instance, and a commentary on the urban development goldrush currently at full steam across China:

"RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China's current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country's future."

You can see more on YouTube here: RMB CITY - A Second Life City Planning: