Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草

Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective离离草 creates art to empower relational community healing. They make space for nuanced narratives rooted in China, the Sinophone diaspora, and other experiences from the margins. Their interdisciplinary praxis interweaves collective poetry, performance, food art, clay, photography, sound, video, children’s games, meditation, herbal medicine, and installation. Their works investigate systems of discipline, control, censorship, and capitalist extraction, and reimagine memory/memorials, rituals, intimacy, and queer/feminist kinship to (re)build sustainable community infrastructures. 

CAO Collective is currently a 2023-24 resident at BRICLab: Contemporary Art cohort and was a collaborator with Laura Li in Feminist Incubator Residency at Project for Empty Space 2022-23. Their community-engaged art organizing has been supported by the Asian American Arts Alliance’s What Can We Do? grant, John Hope Franklin Documentary Award, Benenson Award in the Arts, and beyond. CAO has been invited to host artist talks at alpha nova & galerie futura (Germany), the University of California, Irvine, Pratt Institute, Duke University, Wesleyan University, and the University of Oklahoma. Their community collective poetry and translations have been published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Massachusetts Review.