Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草
Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草


CAO creates art to empower relational organizing and (re)build a sustainable community. 

The (Ruins of) Ciba Shrine
The Ciba Punch(2021-now)
Good Mourning(2022-now)
Collective Poetry Workshops
Spiritual Figures
Grammar Book of Care
Kneading Breaths
Textual Memory
Be-Twined
Strings of Touch
Open Studio
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The Ciba Punch
女拳手打糍粑


Rooted in a feminist ethics of care, the Ciba Punch subverts the Chinese traditional ciba-making (food-making) process and reveals the often-hidden domestic labor performed by womxn. By punching, chanting, making together, this collective performance of Chinese feminists reclaims our own definitions of (em)power(ment) from patriarchal definitions of force and gendering. Together, we reimagine a powerful yet non-punitive way of community building and healing.

May 20th Irvine, California

Performance 

November 19th Newark, New Jersey 

Installation, performance, single-channel projection, sound


September 4th Chinatown, Mahattan 

Performance
Before the punch in this inaugural performance, our 22 performers collectively wrote the words for chanting using the Exquisite Corpse method. Their prompt is an imagined conversation between the writer and a womxn figure whom they want to speak with. Some people wrote towards their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, or towards themselves, whereas others engaged with goddesses in mythologies or recently arrested/disappeared feminist activists in the Sinophone community. In the process of this collective dialogue and food-making, at the intersection with diaspora experiences, our vulnerable stories, feelings, and struggles of transnational feminism emerge.