Trung Cao

His family would spend nine months on a Malaysian refugee island, one of the most densely populated places on Earth at that time, living in a tent made from parts of boats, tree branches for beds, and under horrendous conditions. Eventually, Trung Cao and his family were sponsored by a family in a small town of New London, NC. Through it all, Cao recalls making art. Whether it was in Vietnam or North Carolina, art was always a staple of his life. It wasn’t hard for him to find a form of escapism and freedom in creativity, making art with a pencil, some imagination, and an innate ability, considering the difficulty of the ever-changing time of war and immigration. Art made Trung Cao’s world more joyful through expression and control.

Cao moved to California for high school, having already had the experience of designing logos for t-shirts, painting mascots on gym floors, and murals around town, earning many youth art awards along the way.

Since Trung Cao started making art as a young person, with unrestricted expression and passion, and themes related to his exposure to comics and films, he admits that art was a form of escapism into the fantasy world of overcoming struggles and having the power and ability to change for the greater good. Trung Cao is a self-taught artist who continues to learn bit by bit, by observing nature and his surroundings, and always thinking of how to translate a three-dimensional world to a 2D surface. He has always been enchanted by classical artwork that hangs in museums and spent countless hours studying and wondering how the masters achieved a certain look or feel. Cao would practice creating the same effects in his studio, finding pleasure in this self-discovery. His art evolution was facilitated, in large part, to the materials available from childhood to adulthood, as he moved from pencil and paper to watercolor and acrylic.

For many years as an adult, Cao painted in acrylic and learned how to manipulate the medium to overcome its disadvantage of quick drying. Finally, about 20 years ago, Trung Cao picked up oil after years of admiring the old masters. It took time to self-teach in oil, but eventually, that has become Cao’s favorite medium. Oil paint is one of the oldest artistic mediums and as such, has gone through the test of time. Its transparent nature gives depth to paintings like no other and when painted in layers, each layer filters the light and reflects back in ways that create an illusion of depth. The reason oil paint becomes more transparent over time is due to the continuing oxidation of the oil, however, this becomes an advantage as the painting can become more beautiful through the transparent oil films if it’s executed in layers by the artist.

Today, Trung Cao’s process begins with an idea and the execution is done with aesthetic and beauty in mind, its technical artistry unifying the composition, value, color, and edge. This is his first goal in connecting with the viewers. Behind each work, there is more than just strokes of paint, including the essential values humanity shares. Trung Cao’s art represents hope, dreams, challenges, strength, resilience, fragility, or conservation, inspired by the aesthetic that surrounds us all, the natural world, human nature, and the meaning of existence, freedom, and expression. This can be seen through the lens of the faces in his art, by them human or animal, as well as in the landscapes he paints that convey openness, freedom, and a romanticized natural environment.

Accomplishments

Trung Cao’s artwork has been featured in art galleries and exhibitions, and he’s been interviewed by the press and as a guest on podcasts, but his most proud achievement isn’t the subjective awards, but rather, the contribution he’s been able to make to the art community at large. Cao has helped raise large sums of money through auctions and he’s served as vice president of an art organization’s board, a role that allowed him to bring artists together and convey the importance of art to the community. Trung Cao believes that every child should have access to art while growing up, to add a form of expression where language fails, and to help nourish the growing mind and establish strong neural connections that relate to imagination, creation, expression, and focus.

Cao believes his romantic realism generates curiosity and helps to foster critical thinking about our world. Being from three generations of immigrants and as a refugee, Trung Cao desires to create art that reflects a better place.