RAGILE LIFE AND THE TOUGH……
                                                                                                             Cao Jingping
About Love :
In my dream, I see that huge butterfly, amazingly beautiful. She is so close to me, yet so detached. I want to walk up and touch her, but frustratingly find it impossible.

Butterfly embodies love in China. Before I actually fell in love, I imagined love as beautiful but illusory as mirage. When she actually comes to me, I find love is exciting, but more importantly, it holds another truth under its beautiful surface. While I share the sweetness of love with my lover, I learn to get along with another person. It is a process of pleasure, excitement, sorrow, confusion,and hesitation, losing myself... This process turns my lover from a stranger to the other half of my life. I realize that love is nothing but a unity of opposites. We all long for perfect and absolute love, but it does not exist.
But for this dream I paint Lover again and again. As I working on them, I yield to my indulgence in perfection and my quest to the nature of beauty.

About Life :
We encounter problems every day. We have to face up with various accidents in life. How boring it will be if one's life is like a straight line, dashing to its final without any turns. I believe life will lose its meaning if there is no differences. Therefore, everything in life, the good, the evil, the neutral has its reason to be there, though we may still crave for perfection and Utopia.

We are wearing a fragile body, as fragile as the life of insects, which may easily vanish. As insects have bright and splendid appearances, our lives are just as beauiful. Beautiful things fascinate us, therefore, we are always after the eternity of beauty. However, eternity never exists, even with tough steel. Time passes day by day, and beautiful lives are gradually rusting and fading away. I am concerned with the fragility of life and the hardness of reality. By the contrast of fragile insects which easily pass away and the tough and rusting steel, I make a metaphor of life itself in my paintings.

About Art :
Man grows up with many restraints. Freedom is his yearning for the Other Shore. That is why I like the freedom of art. I hope to express myself freely with various artistic means, so I paint with oils, take photographs and work with mixed media. My mixed media pieces are quite incidental and impromptu. They are my dialogues with my past experiences. I paint huge insects in my oils. They have beautiful but illusory colors. Time leaves its rusting marks on steel. Imaginary scenes create a neutral status between strangeness and familiarity, where we may give our concern to life and its meaning.