Just Because CAO Yu

Wednesday 13 August
12.45 – 1.30pm
Cell Block Theatre

CAO Yu is a pioneering multidisciplinary artist working across diverse media. Renowned for her incisive and bold artistic language, exceptional creativity, and profound international influence, CAO is recognized as one of the most influential emerging artists in Asia: the leading figure of China’s new generation of female artists. She has received numerous domestic and international art awards, with her works exhibited globally at major museums and institutions.

CAO Yu’s works are often known for their strong visual impact and profound thematic thinking. Her artistic exploration involves complex issues such as gender identity, survival status, major historical events, humanity, and interpersonal relationships. In recent years, her works have shown attention and reflection on a wider range of social and cultural issues, while critically contemplating the reality of the world, often challenging propriety and other social conventions.

Her oeuvre has featured in major solo exhibitions across China and Europe, with institutional presentations at leading art museums and institutions sparking critical discourse in Germany, Austria, Norway, Denmark, the United States, South Korea and Australia. In conversation with Luise Guest she will share professional insights gleaned from nearly a decade of artistic research, examining how the artist through explorations of identity and gender has consistently pushed boundaries.

Luise Guest, an independent researcher, writer and curator is currently a sessional academic teaching in the Masters of Curating and Cultural Leadership at UNSW in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture. Her research on Chinese contemporary art has been widely published in print and online. She has written widely about Cao Yu’s work, including in Australasian Art Monthly, the 4A Papers, Randian and the TAASA Journal. She is the author of Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China and Invisible Ink: Feminism and Chinese Identity in Contemporary Art.