The Art and Work of Andy Cao of Cao | Perrot Studio 

Vietnamese-born artist and landscape designer Andy Cao is the founder and design partner of Cao | Perrot  Studio (Los Angeles and Paris).

 

Cao is the recipient of two prestigious fellowships.  In 2001, he was awarded the Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. This life-changing fellowship gave Cao the luxury of time to find his voice as he explored the iconography of Roman churches, and experienced the impact of art, design, and ritual in the public realm.

As a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2010 – 2011), his mission was to observe, reflect, and unlearn. Post Harvard, Cao aims to build an experimental design laboratory in Ho Chi Minh City, emphasizing contemporary landscape design and material innovations while nurturing new design talents.

 

Drawing on diverse cultural backgrounds, Cao | Perrot Studio creates hybrid environments, blending art and landscape to make a place for dreaming. The projects, both temporary and permanent, cross commercial, artistic, and residential boundaries, and vary in size from intimate courtyards to large-scale public parks. They often use overlooked materials to create environments that defy specific meaning and invite the viewer into a contemplative world of color and sensuality.

Cao | Perrot Studio recently won an international competition to design the 600-acre Guangming New Town Central Park in Shenzhen, China. The studio's work has been widely published in books, magazines, and videos and exhibited at international garden festivals and museums, including Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006 at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York.

This lecture is presented by the Garden Conservancy and cosponsored by CornerStone Sonoma, with support from the Garden Conservancy‘s George W. Rowe Education Fund. Meadowcroft Wines is also part of the collaboration.

 

Recent Installations in Sonoma County

Upon completing a one-year Loeb Fellowship at Harvard in 2010, Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot came to the Gardens at CornerStone Sonoma where they spent the month of June 2011 creating their latest two site-specific installations, entitled Bai Yun and Red Lantern. Bai Yun or White Cloud is an amazing construction of chicken-wire and crystals. Standing beneath the cloud crystals and viewing real clouds above is breathtaking. Red Lantern is shaped as a traditional lantern laced with red crystals and references the Chinese immigrants who came to California in the nineteenth century and toiled on the railroads. The lantern sits above a small pond and railroad ties allow the visitor to pass through the shimmering lantern.

 

Visit the installations—and meet Andy Cao—at a reception and dinner on Sunday, November 20, 2011. Click for details.

 

Read more about Andy Cao's vision at CornerStone Sonoma in the July 7, 2011, issue of the Press Democrat.

 

Location
The Walt Disney Family Museum Theater, 104 Montgomery Street, The Presidio, San Francisco

 

Date

Thursday, November 17, 2011

 

Time
Enjoy Sonoma County's Meadowcroft Wines at 6 p.m.
Illustrated talk begins promptly at 6:30 p.m. in the theater

 

Admission
Pre-registration: $30 per person

At the door: $35 per person

 

Online registration is now closed. To pre-register, please call the Garden Conservancy office in San Francisco at 415.441.4300 before 3 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday. Registrations will also be available at the door.

 

Sponsors

Cosponsored by the Garden Conservancy and CornerStone Sonoma, with support from the Garden Conservancy‘s George W. Rowe Education Fund.

             

 

                              

 

 

Thanks also to:

  

We will be serving Sonoma County's Meadowcroft Wines.
Photo: Tom Meadowcroft, vintner for the Meadowcroft Family of Wines.