At 27, Cao Fei is a veteran of several international biennials and surveys of Chinese photography and video. Her hectic 2003 video, ''Rabid Dogs,'' which featured Burberry-clad office workers made up and acting like dogs, was seen in just such a survey at the International Center of Photography last spring.

In ''COSPlayers,'' the eight-minute video accompanied by related photographs that is Ms. Fei's New York gallery debut, outright satire gives way to a skewed drift between fantasy and documentary with wry, poetic and sometimes elegiac results.

At its base, the work is a kind of disjointed, slow-paced action film using stand-in heroes: the young men and women who engage in COSPlay (a Japanese subculture, and short for Costume Play), dress like their favorite anime characters in costumes they make themselves, skulk about and engage in skits. But the video is also a meditation on subcultures and the fusion of belief and suspension of belief that fuels them; and on the rapid passing of the old China, which is everywhere apparent in Guangzhou, the provincial capital where Ms. Fei lives and shot this video.

A place where water buffalo and fields of tall grass can be seen against a backdrop of gleaming 21st-century buildings that might almost be the Emerald City, Guangzhou provides a perfect skulking ground. The occasional addition of brightly painted life-size sculptures of cows and other animals enhances the confusion of reality and fiction.

The resulting mini-movie is a bit slow but wonderfully strange, shot on the fly with the spirited casualness and economy of 1960's French film. The hapless heroes and heroines appear to have the city to themselves; one rail-thin young man in a black cape lopes along a street brandishing a long scythe and no patrol car appears. Finally, the COSPlayers fight mock battles to the death and head for home. In the final shots, they sit around, still in costume, while their elders read newspapers or watch television. ''COSPlayers'' could be shorter, funnier or faster, but its promise is indisputable.