WHERE SEEING HESITATES

FROM ILLUSTRATION TO PERCEPTUAL UNCERTAINTY

Cao Xuanbo, born in London, is a young female artist who was initially trained in illustration, but over time her practice has evolved into fine art, with an increasing interest in installations and sculpture. The employment of restraint, repetition and careful observation carries on her work, providing a subsidiary position of perception as both subject and method.

In contrast to most other artists of that time and today, who were inclined to frame issues of reality through explicit narrative or conceptual background, Cao’s artwork is based on sensory perception. Her objects and images are a result of close looking: of petals, water behind a glass, and blurring, not defining, textures. This adherence to the notice makes her practice bind her to a tradition of inquiry into perception, but her work is not conducted in a formalist abstraction. What is unique about Cao’s approach is that she shows interest in the emotional and psychological implications or ramifications of witnessing a world that appears simultaneously very real and non-real.

The Tulip Series is a part of an earlier phase of Cao Xuanbo and bears a fairly elementary, almost ornamental syntax. The paintings are based on aggressive, flattened colour fields and pure outlines, which create an immediate, tactile feeling rather than perception uncertainties. Here colour serves, however, as an entity, as a present, vivid, contained and legible, as opposed to something unsteady and conditional. This is not the point to which the work finally comes, but rather the point where the language starts. The key in this is not the profundity of concreteness, but the elucidation of will. Such pieces prove that Cao was initially sensitive to the harmony of colours, a gentle tone, and the warmth of emotions, despite the work's visual simplicity. The tulip theme is not addressed as an object to be interrogated as much as a two-dimensional table to be touched. In that regard, this series is more foundational than resolved.

In hindsight, the Tulip Series sets the stage for Cao's future frugality and reservations. The vivid colour contrasts and decorative clarity slowly succumb, in later work, to edges gently rounded, a tamed palette, and a lack of certitude in perception. What in the beginning may look straightforward turns out, with time, to be a place of cutting and whittling. The line of movement is a movement out of colour, a movement out of colour as expression, to colour as mood, to visual immediacy as emotional and perceptual frailty.

Tulip Series, Acrylic Markers on Paper, 10 x 10cm

In the case of Gentle Prison, Cao's practice uses a more subdued, affectively complex language. Colour is tender and bright; however, it is not enclosed in definite shapes any longer. The image loosens. Boundaries are hidden, layers get confused, and spatial reasoning is unclear. What had formerly served as colour on the surface, now starts to serve as colour in the atmosphere. Such works are significantly quiet. The forms themselves dissolve into one another, and they are impossible to define. The focus and visual hierarchy are not central; the eye wanders and is not fixed. This absence of anchoring is intentional, creating a feeling of serenity that cannot be reconciled with slight confusion.

The name of the song, Gentle Prison is descriptive. The structure and force with which confinement is imposed are not hard, but soft. Light colours and blurred lines produce an atmosphere which can be partially protective, even maternal, while restricting movement and clearness rather quietly. The motif is pushed back, and the contrast is also dimmed, unlike the Tulip Series, where the colour is lightened rather than intensified. This reserve indicates increased faith in not stating, but simply notifying. Considered a transitional figure, Gentle Prison is a decisive moment of development, in which hesitation is formalised instead of accidental, establishing the formal and conceptual basis of the later investigation of perceptual uncertainty, of which Cao would go on to do so.

Gentle Prison I, Soft Pastel, Colour Pencil on Paper, 17 x 21cm

Gentle Prison II, Soft Pastel, Colour Pencil on Paper, 17 x 21cm

Gentle Prison III, Soft Pastel, Colour pencil on paper, 17 x 21cm

The same sensibility transports Devour (2023), the piece which is turned towards the inner world and experience. Cao uses darker tones here - dark blues, blacks, thorn-like shapes - to imply an interior condition which is characterised by persistence and not crisis. The pain in this work is not dramatic or demonstrative; it is trapped, nurturing itself, inexplicable. The piece does not indulge the narrative closure, as it contains the tension between vulnerability and standfulness.

This is among the peculiarities of the practice of Cao Xuanbo as it is resistant to being resolved. In various literature, she never makes conclusive statements. Her photographs are not filled with resolutions but are left on the brink of change. This is a quality that is not just accidental, but methodological. Cao does not take uncertainty as something vague, but as a state of being to live in.

Devour, 2023, Soft Pastel, Colour Pencil on Paper, 18 x 18cm

This strategy is supported by her material decisions. The grain and nostalgia come with coloured pencils; diffusion and haze come from soft pastels; intensity comes from acrylic markers, which are imprecise. Although Cao is working digitally, as she did in Escaping in a Dream (2024), she maintains this touch sensitivity by using scans of her hands and rough brushes. The outcome is a digital image that is difficult to believe in the finality the medium is usually associated with, and that gives a feeling of instability and chase. The painting shows an architectural space characterised by repetition, enclosure and slowness. The artwork was created using digital techniques with hand-drawn elements, introducing a repetitive (architectural) space with the ideas of circles, chase, and shut doors. The painting reminds us of the contemporary feelings of surveillance, anticipation, and self-restraints, yet it does not reach the actual social critique. Rather, the feeling of being watched and postponed is made a collective experience to the viewer. With the help of digital layering and a variety of textures, Cao extends her experimentation with boundaries into a virtual space, and this is how psychological imprisonment persists despite the medium applied. Walls, floors, and blocked doors make up a system that seems logical but lacks an escape. Contrary to traditional dream images, which tend to be ambiguous, the Cao digital space is highly structured. This focus on structure is critical. It represents modern conditions of self-control, surveillance, and constant anticipation without falling into outright social criticism.

Cao's transition to three-dimensional work in Origin of Life - Plant Cells symbolises a broad extension of her practice and did not disrupt the conceptual integrity of the work. She makes sculptures from glass and transparent resin that seem alive, but enclosed. The materials add some depth, contemplation, and safety, and they also enhance the notion of enclosure. The motif of the repetitive presence of the so-called witch in this work is interesting not as an iconic phenomenon, but rather as a flexed narrative unit, a unit that enables Cao to work on the idea of creation, freedom of choice, and transformation without descending into illustration.

Rings, Origin of Life – Plant’s Cells, 2025, Glass and Resin

Necklace, Origin of Life – Plant’s Cells, 2025, Glass and Resin

In the wider context of the modern world, Cao Xuanbo should be credited for treating the perceptual question as a continuous action rather than a theme. Her art promotes a less melodramatic paradigm at a time when much contemporary art focuses on immediacy, scale, or direct message. She shows how long and deep focus on colour, on disposition, on emotional subtlety can be a strict artistic stand, a modern one.

Various other aspects, such as the pointlessness and continuity of her path, are equally significant. The artwork's development is through accretion, not discontinuity. New projects are extensions of the previous issues that are tested in new materials and circumstances. The continuity implies a process which can be developed over an extended period of time, not by a novel approach to style, but by an elaborate treatment of concepts.

Altogether, this practice of Cao Xuanbo illustrates an obvious and deliberate trend toward the explicitness of illustration in an open, exploratory fine art language. The initial productions inculcate a sensitivity to colour and surface, whilst series that follow depict increasing confidence in reduction, restraint and perceptual doubt. The current changes with spatial thinking experiments, installations, and sculptural methods show a transitioning artist - one that is leaving behind picture-making to explore more deeply the nature and functioning of emotion, atmosphere, and containment on a larger scale. This continual transformation implies no established status but a practice in continual consolidation of its course, based on the principles of attentiveness, vulnerability, and inquiry, which are ongoing and do not involve the certainty of meaning.

Images: © Cao Xuanbo, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Meng Chunqing