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 was a 2023-24 resident at BRICLab: Contemporary Art (NYC, NY) and a collaborator with Laura Li in the Feminist Incubator Residency at Project for Empty Space 2022-23 (Newark, NJ). Their community-engaged art organizing has been supported by SEEK Raleigh, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Queens Art Fund, Asian American Arts Alliance, and beyond. CAO has been invited to host artist talks at alpha nova & galerie futura (Germany), Hamilton College, 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 Irrelevant Press, The Common, Apogee, Tupelo Quarterly, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Massachusetts Review.

Find CAO at caocollective.com and instagram: @caocollective