Painting on Another Plane: Mandy Cao

Trapped in her dreams, in the half-lit purgatory of insomnia, neither awake nor sleeping, an anonymous young woman wanders through the half-world of the in-between, touching mysterious plants, and embracing the astral entities she encounters – a swan, long black lines of unraveled thread, a huge wolf. She is dark-haired, beautiful, and naked. We never see her face. This is the landscape of folk tales, where magic and reality meet, where nothing is what it seems and everything is meaningful. These are the supernatural workings of Mandy Cao, a painter of unsettling and seductive psychological power.

Mandy Cao, My Sheer Dream

Cao was born in China and immigrated to Los Angeles, California, to join her mother who had come to America two years before. She was fourteen years old. “When I first came here it was really difficult for me,” she says, “I enjoy how chill L.A. is, and how nice and welcoming people are, but I don’t feel like I belong to anywhere. I guess I belong here – I have family here, and now I have kids here. I still think I’m Chinese, but when I go back to China, they think I’m American. I don’t hate that feeling, I take it and enjoy it. I think that’s what makes me different from other artists. I definitely show it in my paintings – I’m living in a world as I want it to be, as I like it.” After high school she attended the renowned Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and soon learned from her professors that she must develop her own style if she was to succeed in the world of galleries and shows and deals. Feeling lost, she decided to paint her feelings of uncertainty, of wandering unsure of her direction in an unfamiliar world. She liked living in the United States, but felt like a stranger in a strange land. Her uncertainty became her style, her cheerful alienation became her message.

Mandy Cao, Time in Desolation

Although her wandering woman drifts through a strange landscape, she is unthreatened – even a monstrous wolf is a protecting entity in her red riding reverie. When detached and spectral hollow hands touch her shoulders, they seem to offer reassurance rather than any haunted threat, and the mysterious fauna she finds is benignly and beautifully mutated. “It’s all like daydreaming,” Cao muses, “it’s the way I look at the world. I look at stuff, the things in the world and I don’t think it’s real. I paint out what I think it should be, from the direction I look at it…. I love the world.” She gathers a perfect white swan into her arms, in a cold land, confined on a tiny ice-cold island of bleached white. It rests its head against her shoulder, safe and secure. Twiggy coral-orange plants grow through a white and grey ground as soft as ashes and snow. The swan is an elegant symbol for love, Cao maintains.

Mandy Cao, Untitled (Swan)

She avoids the nihilistic trap of solipsism. She knows and loves love, and though the long shadow of the sadness of solitude shapes her paintings, any manifestation of melancholy is balanced by a bright optimism. “You’re in the world all alone,” she shares. “I always feel that I’m by myself, even though I’m very happy leading my life. My husband and my kids love me, and I do as well, but there are moments when you’re just by yourself. I love the world, but I do feel lonely, occasionally.” Trapped behind the limitations of sensual perception, she longs to reach the minds of others, to touch them with her thoughts. Sometimes she meets other people in the wandering world, and they touch, but the figures show no sense of connection and they are met as strangers and treated with as much curiosity and dreamy, abstract inquisitiveness as everything else.

Nature is alive and manifested as living leaf figures. She nurtures new shoots and finds plants growing from her body. These raise no alarm, although her body mutates into new forms of life. Here, DNA is fluid. The future is uncertain, but beautiful with a new kind of transhuman sensuality, and Cao works as a benevolent, painterly anthropologist tasked with revealing and interpreting the customs of the unknown culture of her dreams.

Mandy Cao, A Place Only You Know

The creatures she meets and the things she finds are metaphors for important events in Cao’s real life. “I got engaged, and my fiancée, who is my husband now, brought me to Napa to go onto a hot air balloon,” she recalls. “He proposed to me on a balloon. After I came back, I did that painting. I did the umbrella because I felt very safe with him, exactly where I wanted to be, under an umbrella, either under a rainy day or under the sun, I was not lost, I was very happy, I was very definite, getting married to him. Everything seemed very bright in the future.” Cao’s allegories are simple, and honest, filled with innocence and openness, with none of the clever cynicism of the sharp apostles of critical thinking, or the glib sarcasm of pretention. The paintings are open. “Anything that appears in my paintings is a symbol of where I was, but I don’t want to give the people who look at my paintings too much information. I want them to get the emotion and to relate it to their own life, so I always use very vague symbols.”

She kneels in the passive position of prayer, stands relaxed and balanced with a ballerina’s poise, walks a tight rope with flair. She accepts the dream as a dream, and makes no demands of it, and examines the enigmatic objects she finds like a gentle explorer on the surface of a new planet, careful to tread lightly and examine everything. She is a pragmatic explorer of a fantastic setting, like the first woman, an alien fallen into Eden. In pre-pandemic paintings a tent appeared. She plans to stay in this arcadia. She is filled with wonder.

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