NYC/LA
founded in 2022



caocollective
-at- gmail.com

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.

As cultural organizers, they explore social justice-oriented theorizing and narrativizing through communal and processual art practices. 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. They explore the idea of languaging as a moving and fluid site, a contact zone for improvisation. 

CAO Collective is currently a 2023-24 resident at BRICLab: Contemporary Art cohort and was a collaborator with Laura Li in Pedantic Arts Residency (2024, Pittsburgh, PA) and Feminist Incubator Residency at Project for Empty Space (2022-23, Newark, NJ). Their community-engaged art organizing has been supported by the Queens Art Fund, 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), Hamilton College, UC Irvine, Pratt Institute, Duke University, Wesleyan University, and University of Oklahoma. Their community collective poetry and translations have been published by Irrelevant Press, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Massachusetts Review.

C.V. available upon request