Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草 Workshops
March 21 and 22, 2026
Co-presented by LACE and the Feminist Center for Creative Work (FCCW)
Collective Poetry Workshop
Saturday, March 21, 2026, 2–5 PM [capacity: 30 people]
女拳手打糍粑 – Ciba Punch Workshop
Sunday, March 22, 2026, 2–5 PM [capacity: 100 people]
LACE and the Feminist Center for Creative Work, invite you to celebrate the spring equinox or Chūnfēn 春分 (the fourth of the ancient Chinese 24 solar terms, marking the midpoint of spring), falling on March 20, 2026 with two workshops facilitated by Laura Dudu and huiyin zhou from Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草. These workshops explore themes of connection, kinship, collective healing, feminist and queer care, and memory through collective actions.
Collective Poetry Workshop, March 21, 2026, 2–5 PM
CAO’s collective poetry-writing workshops have engaged over 300 community members of the Sinophone diaspora transnationally. CAO Collective carefully designs guiding questions on queer/feminist kinship, food, and memory, to which each participant starts on one page and turns to the next page(s) to continue what other people have written. These queer feminist poetics are intimate conversations with each other, holding space for joy, grief, and otherwise inexplicable feelings living in diaspora. This workshop focuses on QBIPOC folx, but all identities are welcome!
Ciba Punch Workshop, March 22, 2026, 2–5 PM
Rooted in a feminist ethics of care, the Ciba Punch subverts the Chinese traditional ciba (food)-making process and reveals the often hidden domestic labor performed by womxn. By punching, chanting, making together, this collective feminist performance reclaims our own definitions of (em)power(ment) from patriarchal definitions of force and gendering. Together, we reimagine a powerful yet non-punitive way of community building and healing. This workshop is multigenerational and open to all!
About the Artists
Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草 creates art to empower relational community healing. They make space for nuanced narratives rooted in China, the Sinophone diaspora, and other experiences from the margins. As cultural organizers, they explore social justice-oriented theorizing and narrativizing through communal and processual art practices. Their interdisciplinary praxis interweaves collective poetry, performance, food art, clay, photography, sound, video, children’s games, meditation, herbal medicine, and installation. Their works investigate systems of discipline, control, censorship, and capitalist extraction and reimagine memory/memorials, rituals, intimacy, and queer/feminist kinship to (re)build sustainable community infrastructures. They explore the idea of languaging as a moving and fluid site, a contact zone for improvisation.
hú-tu (huiyin zhou & Laura Dudu 嘟嘟) is an artist duo with backgrounds in social practice and anthropology, working across moving image, photography, performance, and collaborative writing. Since 2020, huiyin and Laura have collaborated on over 40 performances, workshops, and exhibitions exploring diasporic queer identity, family memory, generational trauma, and collective grief through ritualistic and community-centered processes. Dedicated to multidisciplinary art and transnational organizing, Laura and huiyin co-founded and co-direct the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草. They also facilitate the Survivors Anchoring Art Narrative Garden (SAANG Project 春风吹), a co-creative, imaginative land for sexual and racial abuse survivors. h tu creates spaces of co-living and collective rest to (re)imagine and (re)learn intimacy and collective survival. Working with material, affective, residual, and conceptual presences, their works speak on/into the potential of intimate knowledge production. Responding to each others’ dream journals and familial photo/video archives, their ongoing project explores memory and home-making through a diasporic queer lens. huiyin and Laura have been awarded residencies at Bunker Projects, Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL), Durham Art Guild, BRIClab, Pedantic Arts, and Feminist Incubator. Their work has received support from BRIC, Raleigh Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Queens Art Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Asian American Arts Alliance, Durham Arts Council, and beyond.
About FCCW
Feminist Center for Creative Work nurtures an ever-evolving, intersectional, intergenerational, and joyful collaborative feminist praxis—modeling ways of working and living through art, programming, media, publishing, and the redistribution of resources, from Los Angeles, within the world. The process is the product. For more information, visit: https://fccwla.org/
Support
This program is supported by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and Teiger Foundation. Special thanks to our friends at the Feminist Center for Creative Work for their support while LACE’s Hollywood gallery is under renovation.
