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Just Because: CAO Yu
Ideas Platform show of multidisciplinary work by Beijing artist CAO Yu, using her own image, fallen hair and urine to probe gendered expectations and beauty ideals.
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Preview: written before the show opened
Presenting Just Because: CAO Yu 曹雨, Artspace’s Ideas Platform features works by Beijing-based CAO Yu that address gendered expectations, patriarchal social structures, and idealised notions of female beauty. Using her own image, fallen hair as thread, and a mirror-like substance made from her own urine, the artworks shift between vulnerability and provocation, subtlety and excess. Together, the works employ dark humour and abjection to probe the uneasy relationships between beauty and vanity, self-image and social expectation, desire and disgust. CAO Yu has garnered international acclaim for potent multidisciplinary works that engage her own body, image and lived experience as a primary medium. She reveals a complex negotiation of social constraints from the perspective of a female artist living in China. The Ideas Platform is generously supported by TWT Property Group.
Look for
Piss-Take a Look at Yourself (2023)
Look for an upright, mirror-like surface made from the artist's own urine, a pun on a Chinese saying about taking a hard look at yourself.
Everything is Left Behind (2012 to ongoing)
Look closely at the canvases: the stiff, clumsy lettering is stitched in her own shed hair, spelling out insults about her gender and appearance.
Dragon Head (2020)
Look for the self-portrait of the artist perched on a concrete sink against a faded brick wall, a broken tap spraying water between her legs.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Locals Who've Seen It All
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Image credits
8
- Just Because: CAO YuCourtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile. Photo: Yang Hao
- Nolan: OriginsCourtesy of Art Gallery of New South Wales
- Definitive DupainMax Dupain / Google Art Project, Public domain
- ArtspaceUser6499 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Art Gallery of New South WalesBidgee / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5 AU
- Hyde Park BarracksJ Bar / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- State Library of New South WalesBidgee, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Australian Museumwuppertaler / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0