Cao Xiaodong was born in 1961 in Lianyungang City, Jiangsu Province. He lives and works in Beijing.

Cao Xiaodong is a member and founder of the Internationally renowned art group ‘Red Trip’. He has had solo exhibitions in Singapore, Hong Kong, USA, China and Taiwan.

Cao Xiao Dong combines, seemingly without effort, the most modern method of image creation and the most traditional. His pictures resemble old news photos, but like China’s ancient philosopher-painters, he controls his brushstrokes with care, shuns dramatic colours and contrasts, and deletes all traces of ego. After scanning an old photo into his computer, Cao Xiao Dong uses PhotoShop to convert it into an array of dots like those once used to print newspaper pictures. Then, one dot at a time, he copies the image in oils (in more recent works, he prints a “ghost” version of the photo onto the canvas and paints over each dot). In traditional style, he lays his canvases flat and holds his brush vertically. Old-time painters used mists to create a mysterious haze; in Cao Xiao Dong’s works, the blank spaces between the dots make the images dissolve if the viewer comes too close. His sole embellishments are computer commands. In the Proof of Youth series (2009), terms like Save As, Exit and Ctrl-V—“words” in today’s universal language—adorn paired snapshots of Westerners and their Chinese counterparts.

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