Coming out as queer to your family is an extremely intimate—yet common—experience. When Mengwen Cao went through the process in 2016, they created a video to show to their parents on FaceTime, recorded the call, and then made that recording into an artwork, Here We Are. Alongside Cao, the viewer anxiously awaits the parents’ response: the call ends with the artist’s father saying, “we can accept it. But to be honest, we still have conventional … ideas.” Before the screen fades to black, Cao’s mother adds, “if in the future you see a man you like, that will be great.”
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Cao, who was born in Hangzhou, China, made this work while studying at the International Center of Photography in New York, where they’re now based; the piece was a starting point of sorts. Their subsequent works straddle the art world and photojournalism. For their project “I Stand Between” (2017–18), Cao interviewed and photographed East and Southeast Asians who were adopted into white American families. Where Here We Are deals with an emotional distance resulting from sexuality, I Stand Between engages with race. Often, Cao’s subjects appear in quiet, quotidian moments. In soft focus and splashes of color, their portraits of queer and trans people of color, as seen in “Liminal Space” (2017– ongoing), feel both familiar and transcendent. “I started to realize that the personal is really political,” Cao told me in an interview, “and by showing your intimate stories from a very authentic place, it can connect people in ways that you cannot even imagine.”
Though driven by a desire to depict marginalized experiences, Cao stressed that representation isn’t everything. Much of their photojournalism has, in the artist’s own words, “gravitated toward the things I care about the most in my artmaking: stories about how Asian communities live, how queer communities live, how migrants live.” Their clients have included NPR and the New York Times; their subjects, gentrification and other forms of anti-Asian violence. Their work is about more than visibility; Cao knows from experience that marginalization can be multivalent. The common denominator in all their work is a rich range of emotions and experiences, and stories that ask the viewer to appreciate nuance.