Levy Lu Cao
Levy (they/them) is a printmaker, painter, and digital artist based in Austin, Texas. They create work in their little burrow, evoking stories about fearful little rabbits and Chinese cultural mythologies. They had a transformative experience in the Tallmadge Woods at the Ox-Bow School of Art, which deepened their connection to telling stories by introducing the medium of comics. As a Studio Art major at the University of Texas at Austin, Bunny has accumulated a closet full of paintings and a pile of prints beneath their bed. Some of their most recent exhibitions are Ensemble (2024) at the Visual Arts Center and Braided Waves of Memory (2024) at the ICOSA Gallery. They dream of migrating to Chicago and wearing embroidered winter coats.
My work borrows from subjects of deep personal significance. I explore the intersection of personal memory, cultural mythology, and the liminal spaces where identities, histories, and symbols blur. I immerse myself in as many different artistic mediums as I can, to reach an understanding with myself and my art by grasping as many different experiences as possible. I am an oil painter, a printmaker of relief, intaglio, monotype, and risography, a digital illustrationist, and cartoonist.
By revisiting traditional narratives and reinterpreting familiar motifs, I create works that balance vibrancy and vulnerability, honoring both the richness of storytelling and the complexities of existence. One of my most meaningful recent projects was a monotype series inspired by Journey to the West, a Ming dynasty novel which holds great importance in East Asia. I was inspired by the different iterations of the story that have formed throughout time, there having been movies, cartoons, puppet shows, and plays that I watched as a child. I wanted to borrow from a greater piece of history and illustrate my own take on the characters and events in the story.
That same impulse to honor personal and cultural history drove me to paint a 4 x 5’ portrait of my grandmother, beaming with pride as she stands beside her mustard green harvest. I found the fact that the painting I made of her didn’t fit in my parents' car funny to me. My love and appreciation for her could not be contained inside an ordinary vehicle. Another visual motif I love to use is rabbits. To me, the shape of a rabbit in particular has been holding my interest. It starts with an odd circle, then jumps over the two hills of the ears and comes back around in some egg shape. Its limbs stretch and scream for escape from predators, and I capture this on canvas in saturated compositions. It is both familiar and elusive, innocent yet burdened by instinct. I often find myself thinking about how “domestic rabbits are one of the few pets which can be enjoyed dead or alive,” an idea that I ironically found expressed in Life magazine. Unlike cats and dogs, which are either beloved companions or pitiable strays, rabbits occupy a strange liminal space. They can be cherished pets, but also hunted by humans. They are wild, yet are allowed to live in our homes without being fully domesticated.
I like to explore this ambiguous relationship humans have to rabbits in my artwork, sometimes adopting from Chinese cultural mythologies for color and style. Through printmaking and painting, I create vibrant works that evoke the richness of the animal’s story, and contrast the innocent appearance of bunnies with the emotional depth of a prey animal’s instincts. I feel that there is a truth to an animal’s feelings of safety, suffering, and fear to which humans can empathize but never truly understand. I want to humble myself to their truth by borrowing their forms while trying to work through my own feelings.