In Conversation: CAO Yu and Dr Gene Sherman AM

How can humour, vulnerability, discomfort and the body interrogate social conventions? 

Join Beijing-based artist CAO Yu in conversation with curator, collector and cultural advocate Dr Gene Sherman AM.

Ahead of CAO Yu’s forthcoming presentation in Artspace’s Ideas Platform, Just Because: CAO Yu 曹雨, the conversation reflects on the evolution of the artist’s practice across performance, photography, video and installation. Together, they consider how CAO Yu has used her own body, image and lived experience to confront gendered expectations, patriarchal structures, idealised notions of female beauty, human nature and the human condition.

From the intimate materiality of Everything is Left Behind (2012–ongoing), in which the artist stitches social and familial judgments into white canvases using her own fallen hair, to the provocative self-portrait Dragon Head (2020) and the abject humour of Piss-Take a Look at Yourself (2023), CAO Yu transforms the personal into a site of resistance.

Sherman’s longstanding engagement with artists and creative communities across China and the Chinese diaspora offers a distinctive context for the conversation, drawing on decades of advocacy and exchange through Sherman Galleries, the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the Sherman Centre for Culture and Ideas.

Gain insight into how artists negotiate the social and cultural structures that shape bodies, identities and images, and how humour, vulnerability and the personal can become powerful tools for challenging them.