Cao Fei: Blueprints review – would you trade love for progress?

Serpentine Gallery, London
The Chinese artist searches for meaning in times of great change - from communist lovers caught in the 50s Sino-Soviet divide to modern warehouse workers who can't relate

Love doesn't figure highly in the Serpentine Gallery's critical lexicon - too sentimental perhaps, too old-fashioned. But it pulses, unmentioned, beneath the surface of Cao Fei's Blueprints. Love is evidence that we are recognised as individuals, as significant. Love is what we are asked to set aside in the name of progress under a revolutionary regime. Love, too, is imperilled by automation, given how it minimises human contact.

Two great loves sit at the heart of Cao Fei's feature-length film Nova from last year: a romance between two computer scientists - one Russian, one Chinese - and the relationship between the latter and his son. Both loves fall foul of Sino-Soviet progress. The Russian scientist, part of a delegation dispatched to help construct China's earliest computer system in the 1950s, is forced to leave Beijing when her work is done. In her absence, the Chinese scientist submits his son to an experiment that locks him in virtual limbo between the past and future.