Yearly Report 2024 CAO Collective
About CAO Collective & Our Yearly Report
Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草 creates art to empower relational community healing. We make space for nuanced narratives rooted in China, the Sinophone diaspora, and other experiences from the margins. As cultural organizers, we explore social justice-oriented theorizing and narrativizing through communal and processual art practices. Our interdisciplinary praxis interweaves collective poetry, performance, food art, clay, sound, and installation. We reimagine memory/memorials, rituals, intimacy, and queer/feminist kinship to (re)build sustainable community infrastructures.
This yearly report provides an overview of CAO Collective’s work from January to December 2024, including program highlights, key statistics, and exhibition snapshots. We hope this yearly ritual allows us to reflect on past work, celebrate achievements, give thanks to our community and chart new directions for the future.
Table of Contents
1 Our Name Message to community members
2 3 5 7 9
Theory of Change
Community Structure
2024 by the numbers Financial Summary
Exhibition Highlight: to hold a we
Event Highlight: Ciba Punch 2024
Event Highlight: Sticky Rice Dumplings for Palestine
Photo Exhibitions
Press & Publications
Posters & Pamphlets
Looking Forward
Special Thanks & Let’s keep in touch!
Dear community members,
With your support, CAO has finished our second year of community oriented programming. From writing workshops, performances, gatherings to exhibits and fundraisers, CAO has grown as an ever-evolving home, a meadow for play, connection, and experimentation. CAO’s growth is nurtured by our fluid community of Sinophone activists, BIPOC queer/feminists, artists, organizers, elders, youth and children.
This year has been difficult for many of us. We have witnessed multiple genocides and ecocides in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Western North Carolina, and the rise of nazism globally endangers our communities’ sense of safety and wellbeing. CAO has also pivoted our work to supporting Gaza mutual aid efforts while struggling to figure out sustainable funding for our cultural organizing. But now more than ever, we are reminded again of the incredible resilience of our communities. We need each other to not only survive but also create infrastructures of care and radical rest through collective art making. somatic practice, and narrativizing.
It is our hope that CAO’s third year calls in more community abundance as we invite you to partake in collective mapping of grounded visions for justice.
CAO COLLECTIVE
Our Name
Our Chinese name, 离离草 (li li cao), comes from a line of poem by the poet 白居易 Bai Juyi from the Tang dynasty. The poem is called 赋得古原草送别 A Poem for Sending Off a Friend on the Wild Field:
离离原上草，一岁一枯荣。
野火烧不尽，春风吹又生。
Grass thriving in the field, they die and flourish every year. The wildfire cannot burn it all; when wind blows in the spring, they will come back alive.
(Translation by CAO Collective)
The word 离 Li also means “to leave” or “to be apart.” It is part of the word 离散 Li San, diaspora. Our members are geographically scattered so we are often apart. We arrive to converge and then leave again. We and other Chinese and Sinophone communities look out for each other. We are diasporic but not separate. Our acronym in English, CAO, is a play on the pronunciation of 草 Cao, or grass, in Chinese. It is also a homonym of a popular and censored curse word and used as a creative way to express often-dismissed and erased complaints as well as an oppressed rage.
Theory of Change
Grounding our work in queer feminist ethics of care, abolition, and justice for all peoples, CAO Collective’s work is ever evolving and rooted in community needs and visions. Navigating our multiple overlapping roles as organizers, artists, writers, caretakers, and healers, we are constantly reflecting and pivoting as needs and struggles arise.
Our work is guided by the following core visions:
1) Sustainable, Relational Cultural Organizing
Beyond survival mode and crisis response that marginalized communities are often forced into, we believe that participatory art-making and cultural organizing are crucial political strategies whereby we take back the power that belongs to our community. At CAO, we use art to build sustainable practices and infrastructures of care, expand our community’s capacities for change, and plant long-lasting, grassroots seeds of change.
2) Community Empowerment Through Art
With the conviction that art belongs to everyone, we strive to provide culturally aware programming that provides multiple access points for people of different ages and abilities. We are committed to bringing social-justice oriented art programs to public spaces traditionally excluded from the arts industry.
3) Narrative Change
CAO’s work envisions community participatory, multimedia storytelling as a pathway to narrative change and ultimately societal change. We create spaces where our community can name our experiences and create languages for the world we want to see.
4) Embodied Healing Justice
We believe that our bodies are sacred sites of intergenerational knowledge. Art helps us rebuild caring relationships to our individual and collective bodies, witnessing and healing wounds caused by structures of violence.
5) Mutual Aid and Interdependence
In an increasingly isolated world shaped by capitalist and colonial structures of “divide and conquer,” we believe that artists and cultural organizers must uphold visions of mutual aid and interdependence in our work. We strive to create spaces of gathering where our needs are seen and supported communally. We use our art and platform to facilitate artists’ active engagement in mutual aid efforts locally and transnationally.
community structure
Community members
CAO is rooted in the Sinophone diaspora and the Chinese queer feminist community, and we work with broader AAPI and BIPOC communities too.
Co-directors
CAO’s co-directors oversee all aspects of CAO’s work: internally, they are responsible for visionary and strategic planning, grant development; for public-facing work, they lead artistic production, facilitate programming and direct CAO’s public messaging.
Collaborators
CAO builds and shares space with long-term and project-based collaborators. We also work with value-aligned orgs in solidarity.
working members
CAO’s working members come from different academic, arts, and movement backgrounds and complement each other in our work. CAO members help with publicity, community event facilitation, and publication.
We are currently volunteer-based and still navigating more sustainable financial structures.
2024 by the numbers
Clinton,NY
Queens,NY
Brooklyn,NY
Pittsburgh,PA
Toronto, Canada
Irvine,CA
Akita,Japan China
Bangkok,Thailand
Durham,NC
Raleigh,NC
Gainesville,FL
Exhibition Highlight: to hold a we
is CAO
Collective’s site-specific, three-piece multimedia installation. It is part of the to hold a we exhibition organized by Maria McCarthy and danilo machado at
Drawing inspiration from Shang Dynasty female general and empress Fu Hao’s Tomb 妇好墓(ca. 1600-1050 B.C. ) and Han Dynasty The Tomb of Lady (168 B.C.E.), it is a sitespecific, three-piece multimedia installation that turns the gallery into a living space of gathering, mourning, and memory-making. Ciba 糍粑, a southern Chinese dessert, is made through punching steamed sticky rice. CAO Collective’s ongoing 女拳手打糍粑 and re-excavate food-making practices as a ritual to communicate with the land. The installation builds on the performances and centers sticky rice as a symbol for diasporic (dis)connections, community resilience, and
is a leading arts and media institution anchored in Downtown Brooklyn, New York, whose work spans contemporary visual and performing arts,
The exhibition was on view at BRIC from Sept 18 to
we will be ancestors too (2024)
Eighty-one mugwort cushions: 15 3/4 inches x 16 inches each, mugwort fluff, cotton, linen and polyester, mulberry silk, hand stitching
we will be ancestors too 九层之台 reclaims the multi-step stoop into a community altar with eighty-one mugwort cushions. The number nine symbolizes divine connection and was exclusively used for royal architecture in feudal China. For this work, the artists multiply nine by itself to create eighty-one cushions, reclaiming the divine and returning it to the public. Hand-stitchings of made-up characters inspired by collectively written poetry, CAO’s community comic workshop, and oracle bones writing 甲骨文, make the cushions into a community dictionary of care. As the audience sit on the cushions, they are surrounded by mugwort’s mild herbal scent that alleviates insomnia and anxiety. After what’s visible has left, what lingers and what remains? The altar welcomes the audience to embody ancestors, spirits, and our future selves through shared breaths and dreams.
to hold a we (2024)
Five kneeling cushions : 13cm x 49cm x 46 cm x 20 cm (5.1 inches x 19.3 inches x 18.1 inches x 7.9 inches) each
Fabric: 92 inches x 116 inches,
Studio community-used mattress: 60 inches x 80 inches, laser-cut prints, mulberry silk, cotton, vegan fur, metal bells
Sixteen mugwort cushions: 15 3/4 inches x 16 inches each
Community altar table: 13 inches x 46 inches x 3 inches, printed community zines and books
In to hold a we 生于毫末, a fabric interwoven with spiritual bells gently sits on mugwort艾绒 cushions and a couch-mattress used by community members to chat and nap in CAO Collective’s BRIClab studio from 2023-2024. The fabric is inspired by the silk banner from Lady Dai’s tomb, which is used in the “calling of the soul” ritual after death. Five kneeling cushions surround the fabric, with designs inspired by Five Elements of Transformation五行 in Chinese cosmology, engravings from buried bronze food vessels, and oracle bone writings from Fu Hao’s Tomb. The color red symbolizes blood and menstruating bodies who are often barred from religious spaces. The community altar holds three publications: Ciba Punch zine 女拳手打糍粑诗集 (2022), Written on Blank Papers 写在纸上 (2024), Born-Again 又-生 (2024) and community-sourced organizing zines for people to read through. This centerpiece invites the audience to sit, read, and meditate in a place of rest and rebirth.
the oracles we burn (2024)
Columns constructed from plywood panels: 30.5 inches x 35.7 inches x 10 feet, 30 inches x 36 inches x 10 feet, text, drawing, polaroid, linocut prints, rice paper, cotton steamer cloth, sticky rice straw, dried leaves, sticky rice root, sticky rice husks, oracle bone
In the oracles we burn 合抱之木, CAO builds two columns with community photos, poetry, and social movement ephemera. Inspired by steles 石碑 and couplets placed at the entrance of Chinese shrines and tombs, these columns are simultaneously a community archive and a passage into a space of collective memory and queer feminist myth-making. Steamer cloth 笼布, a soft and resilient kitchen item, embraces this tree of fragile archives and remnants from movement spaces. Printed on both photo papers and rice papers, the photos of CAO past hangouts, workshops, and community events, remain their opacity and privacy from consumption and state violence behind the cloth. The cloth serves as both a veil and an invitation, an opening pathway to enter and to embrace. When the audience gently lifts up the edges, like opening a curtain or flipping a page of a book, they uncover intimate moments, poetries, journal prompts and are invited into the moments of kinship. Sticky rice straw-braided threads and dried sticky rice roots sit at the bottom of the columns, regrounding community memory work as diasporic home- and future-making.
Performance at opening reception
On Sept 18, 2024, CAO Collective hosted a Ciba Punch 女拳手打糍粑 performance at the opening reception of to hold a we exhibition at BRIC. We worked with artists Julia Santoli, Qile Sun, and Alice Wang to bring collective breathing, humming, and punching to BRIC.
This performance embodies queer/feminist ancestors in our pasts and futures, providing spiritual guidance that is both transcendent and playful.
The two spiritual figures 女灵 were conjured into the space by the two ciba punchers for a transient journey together. As the punchers pounded on steamed sticky rice to make ciba, the spiritual figures danced, breathed, and hummed between the columns. The audience sitting on the stoop with hand-stitched cushions and among the pieces joined the humming. Their voices and forms were ambiguous but grounding alongside the rhythm of punching, transforming the gallery into a living shrine. As the punchers finished making ciba, the spiritual figures returned to nesting in the earth, but the ephemerality lingered.
Event Highlight: Ciba Punch 2024
Three years of The Ciba Punch
Rooted in ethics of care, The Ciba Punch 女拳手打糍粑 is an ongoing participatory-performance series that invites participants to punch steamed sticky rice into 糍粑 (ciba – rice cakes) as an act of queer feminist resistance.
Ciba is a Chinese rice cake often eaten with brown sugar and other dips. By making ciba in public, CAO hopes to reclaim the feminized, ostracized labor of cooking in domestic spaces and see food as a queer/feminist, processual archive for movement building. Channeling our rage, grief, and love for each other into the communal labor of food-making, the Ciba Punch invites participants to reimagine and celebrate (em)power(ment) as radical nonviolence.
Another part of the performance, Spiritual Figures, embodying queer/feminist ancestors and our future selves, roam around the ciba punchers to provide spiritual guidance through humming and breathing.
From 2022 to 2024, CAO Collective has hosted The Ciba Punch in four spaces and brought its stories to many more, each engaging with different diverse participants.
Manhattan, NY. September 2022
Irvine, CA. May 2023
Brooklyn, NY. September 2024
Queens, NY. September 2024
As much as the Ciba Punch explores the physicality of touch and sonic resonance, it also explores intimacy without verbal utterance or physical presence. Spiritual Figures, led by CAO’s long-term collaborator Julia Santoli, embody our erased queer/feminist ancestors and incarcerated feminist activists in China. They provide spiritual guidance for the performers and invite morethan-human connections into this ritual of call-andresponse, mourning, and recovery.
On Sept 21, 2024, We brought the performance to Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing, NY. This new iteration welcomed more diverse and intergenerational local communities to join. We were able to talk about the meaning of 女拳/女权 feminist/punch with Chinese elders, as well as playing with kids who enjoyed making a mess with sticky rice (we appreciate meaningful messes!). In the end, QBG and CAO counted 125 adults and 9 children who participated in the event.
It was a very meaningful experience for us to connect with diasporic community members outside of art and organizing spaces. As a group of diasporic Chinese queer feminists who grew up in mainland China and now based in North America, our positionalities have been marked by geopolitical borders, but the marks we bear might be very different from others in the diaspora.
We have always been thinking about how to reach out to more than our core communities, and the Ciba Punch we offered never failed as a space of care, conversations, and play. For many (im)migrant communities we have interacted with, the in-betweenness of our migrant lives in many ways resembles Ciba, in its malleability, resilience, and capacity to constantly transform. It is our hope to bring this performance, rooted in transnational yet intimate visions of community building and queer feminist kinship, to the AAPI and broader communities.
Event Highlight:
members made zongzi (sticky rice dumplings) together to fundraise for an 18-year-old Palestinian girl Rahaf Nasser, have been involved in different ways and extent in the
Although many of us were not familiar with making zongzi, we were able to teach each other and wrap our care and love tightly into the palm-sized rice dumplings. In the fragrance of green bamboo leaves soaked overnight, the white and black sticky rices, and the dried red dates, we made a total of 97 zongzi and decorated them with white, black and red strings, all being colors of Palestine.
We tabled at W.O.W. Project’s “springs from below” evening celebration for the whole evening and sold our zongzi to community members and passers-by, while making meaningful new connections. In the end, we were able to raise a total of $1127 USD or Є1054 Euros.
After the event, we also published a guide on making zongzi so that community members can host their own fundraising events. It is now included in the Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry Library.
Photo Exhibitions
UPROOT: BIPOC Visions of Our Food
Our artwork “Transformation (Ciba Punch)” was included in the UPROOT: BIPOC Visions of Our Food exhibition.
UPROOT is a curated experience that includes sound baths, food, experiences, and art workshops, in addition to a community art show. Through collective envisioning of an equitable and just food system, this healing and interactive show shares the artwork, experiences, and stories of local BIPOC food leaders and community members.
This show is a collaboration between Art as Method and Durham Powerful Arts Collective in Durham, NC, and was hosted in July 13th–August 31st at North Star Church of the Arts and Earthseed Land Collective.
State of The Nation: A BIPOC Artist Perspective
Our photograph was featured in "State of The Nation: A BIPOC Artist Perspective" exhibit curated by Ma's House at the Old Stone House (OSH) in Brooklyn, NY.
State of The Nation: A BIPOC Artist Perspective delves into the intricate relationship between politics, social justice, and healing through the lens of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) artists.
Ma's House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc., founded as a grassroots art space, embodies this philosophy, illustrating the potent intersection of art and activism in the pursuit of social justice and community empowerment.
Durham Art Guild 70th juried exhibition
Our photo from Good Mourning was included in the Durham Art Guild’s 70th juried exhibition in Durham, NC. The exhibition was on view Nov 26, 2024 to Jan 26, 2025.
The Durham Art Guild is a nonprofit memberdriven visual arts organization established in 1948. Its mission is to enrich and connect our communities by creating opportunities and providing leadership for current and future visual artists and art enthusiasts.
Anything But Still
Our photo series from Good Mourning
was featured in the group exhibition Anything But Still at Block Gallery in Raleigh, NC.
Anything But Still aims to expand the traditional concept of 'still life' beyond the simplistic definition of an arrangement of objects. photography practice. It was on view from September 11 to November 23, 2024.
Collaborative Project:
Writing Your Future Self Workshops with Yidan Zeng
Who is allowed to dream? Who is allowed to shape the future? Held twice at 谷雨 (gǔ yǔ) and 处暑 (chù shǔ) in 2024, this collective writing workshop offered a space for communing with versions of ourselves from our wildest dreams.
Participants wrote together virtually and responded to each other's lines/lives, helping to fill in sensory details about futures that are ever shaken by uncertainties, yet are inevitably shared. We meditated and wrote into a reality with “salt water against my cheek,” where we would be “small and infinite.” We heard “the sound of windchimes” and “oil sizzling in a wok.” We envisioned futures with “sunlight, gardens, laughter and company,” “pots, pans, utensils clattering,” and “a queer rave.” We saw the “dazzling sun” and “sparkling mirrors,” reflected in which were our desires to create “without fear, toward freedom.” What futures do you imagine for yourself and your community?
Yidan Zeng 曽一丹 is a queer Chinese-American artist stitching together text, textiles, performance, and food towards an embodied practice of attention and care. Their works are continually woven webs with no center, seeking only to make tangible the invisible threads in our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the natural world. insta: @yidan_zeng | website: yidanzeng.com
4/18 Writing Your Future Self workshop
8/23 Writing Your Future Self workshop
Press
The (Ruins of) Ciba Shrine featured in Hyperallergic
CAO’s installation The (Ruins of) Ciba Shrine and opening performance at the to hold a we exhibition at BRIC were featured in a Hyperallergic report by Lisa Yin Zhang on Oct 6, 2024.
Lisa wrote that CAO’s opening performance was a “tenuous spell”, and it was “beautiful to be held aloft by some collective energy for one pure, suspended moment.”
Hyperallergic is a leading voice in contemporary perspectives on art, culture, and more.
The Ciba Punch featured in Hyperallergic In this May 27 report by Elaine Velie on artists supported by the Queens Art Fund, we introduced the new iteration of our performance The Ciba Punch in Flushing.
Publications
Apogee
Apogee is a literary organization that encourages thoughtful exploration of identity at its intersections: race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability status. The two poems we published with Apogee are Womb and Liquid Heart , both written during our collective poetry workshops on “home” in the summer of 2023.
What is evoked in us when we “steal glances into the lights of other homes/ on tiptoes?” What is the cost to “sink my teeth into the tender egg?” Read on Apogee’s website. (link)
The Common The Common is a literary organization whose mission is to deepen our individual and collective sense of place.
Our translated poem qiào bā was published by The Common’s special feature Burning Language: New and Queer Chinese Voices.
What does it mean to encounter a familiar dialect on the other side of the ocean, when you have lost it yourself? Can we make peace with the languages and their power dynamics that live in our bodies? qiào bā maps playful ways into these questions. Read on the Common’s website. (link)
Tupelo Quarterly
Tupelo Quarterly publishes work by emerging and established writers and artists of many sensibilities and styles.
The piece included in TQ32, “Undying Springs: Translated Community Poetry & Photography,” is an interdisciplinary collection of memories from CAO’s workshops and events in 2022 and 2023.
Scholar & Feminist Online: Rage, Struggle, Freedom issue
S&F Online is a triannual, multimedia, peer-reviewed, online-only journal of feminist theories and women’s movements. This special issue includes CAO’s translated poems “Auntie” and “The Winds on Every Street” written by participants of our first Ciba Punch performance in 2022.
Born-Again
Our bilingual poetry collection selfpublished in collaboration with artist Alice Wang and translator JT. The poems were collectively written by a group of harassment survivors on safety, resilience, and healing, instead of sentimentalizing trauma.
With a double-layered colorful design that resembles windows or portals, the book is made to be reminiscent of a children’s picture book which emphasizes the care and playfulness in the process of healing together.
Posters & Pamphlets of 2024
Looking Forward
CAO is heading strong into the latter half of our third year! To all our community members, collaborators, volunteers, partner organizations, and donors who have participated and supported our work: you have our immense gratitude. With the looming threats of another Trump era and right-wing fascism and ethno-nationalism globally, we need each other to survive, organize, and build new worlds where BIPOC queer, feminists, elders and youth are safe. We need to mobilize the transformative power of arts to heal intergenerational wounds, foster care infrastructures, and build internationalist and abolitionist solidarities with our Palestinian, Iranian, Sudanese and all other oppressed siblings
We have many exciting plans for 2025, with performances, exhibitions, and workshops scheduled in Los Angeles, CA; Pittsburgh, PA; Durham, NC; Raleigh, NC; NYC, NY; and beyond. We can’t wait to bring our practice to diverse communities transnationally.
As a grassroots art and organizing collective, CAO’s work has largely relied on our working members’ donated time in addition to other personal and work commitments. 2024 marked a transitional point for us, thanks to The Field’s Social Justice Practitioner Fiscal Sponsorship Program. In 2025, CAO will continue researching and building financial infrastructures that can sustain our members’ time and labor.
Always, in care, solidarity, and steadfastness.
Special Thanks
(Alphabetical order)
Individuals
Alice Wang
ash
Caiwei Chen
danilo machado
Eddy Zheng
Henry J. Simonds
Holly Meadows-Smith
Joyce T
Julia Santoli
Lele
Lillian Xuege Li
Maria McCarthy
Qile Sun
Sarah Williams
Selene Preciado
Stephanie Alvarado
Yasmine Nasser Diaz
Yidan Zeng
Organizations and Institutions
angryasianwomxn
Art in DUMBO
BRIC Arts Media
ChineseFeminism
Duke Arts
Duke Center for Documentary Studies
Durham Art Guild
Durham Arts Council
Feminist Center for Creative Work
Foundation for Contemporary Arts
Hamilton College East Asian Languages and Literatures
Department
Irrelevant Press
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
New Breath Foundation
New York Foundation of Arts Queens Arts Fund
Pedantic Arts Residency
Q-Wave
Queens Botanical Garden
Raleigh Arts
Red Canary Song
The Field
The University of California Natural Reserve System
Urgent Action Fund
W.O.W. Project
Photo Credits
huiyin
Laura 嘟嘟
Sebastian Bach
Tony Tenenbaum
workshop participants
Some photos are by unspecified photographers
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Website: caocollective.com
Email: caocollective@gmail.com
