A Chinese surrealist turns sunny in SoCal
THE BEIJING-SoCAL CONNECTION
He fled a homeland that gave him dark visions. Now a painter of idylls, he looks East again.
CLIMB the steep slope of Cao Yong's driveway in La Habra Heights, and the idyllic fruit of his hard-won immigrant success story suddenly appears.
A huge, green, stone Buddha sits benevolent and serene above a trickling artificial stream. Behind the shrine, the hill goes on ruggedly upward. Here, Cao's house of dark wood and cream-colored stucco seems to be a peaceful way station for a life that has unfolded like an adventure tale, filled with bold gambits, daring escapes and hard new beginnings in foreign lands.
Once an art-rebel who was literally a wanted man in his native China, Cao is now a wealthy painter of romantic visions of California, Hawaii and the Italian coast, having remade himself in three countries by mustering physical endurance, resourcefulness and a classic immigrant's willingness to adapt.
Cao (pronounced "chow") first emerged in 1989, the tumultuous and bloody year when freedom of expression flowed briefly in China before being snuffed in the Tiananmen Square massacre. By 1999, he was on his way to success in Southern California, painting tenderly manicured scenes as benevolent and serene as his hillside Buddha. He issues his lush landscapes and inviting city views under his own imprint, Cao Yong Editions, and they hang on thousands of middle-class American walls. Cousins to the critically reviled but vastly popular paintings of Thomas Kinkade, signed, limited-edition prints of Cao's work are sold in more than 300 galleries, fetching $1,000 to $2,000 each.
Now the rise of a frazzled bourgeoisie in China -- millions of people who might want to flop into an easy chair and gaze on serenity at the end of a hardworking day -- has prompted him to launch his own gallery in the Beijing he fled 19 years ago. The Cao who was forced to run in 1989 was a painter of disturbing, darkly surrealistic visions suffused with spirituality and sexuality and shrouded in death. The one who has returned paints benedictions to the good life he found in the West.
Beijing, Feb. 19, 1989 (Reuters): Chinese police have raided an exhibition of nude paintings influenced by Tibetan Buddhism and shown to a shocked Beijing public. . . . Uniformed policemen confiscated six paintings and questioned artist Cao Yong. . . . One painting shows a heap of naked women below Buddhist monk-like figures and another depicts a woman dragging two men by their genitalia out of a fire.
