User:Studio5LA/Andy Cao

Andy Cao

American landscape designer and public artist, Andy Cao was born in Tay-Ninh, Vietnam, November 9, 1965. Both his parents were teachers. In 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War, Cao’s family moved from the coastal city of Nhatrang in central Vietnam to his grandmother’s rice farm on the outskirt of Ho-Chi-Minh City. This was Cao’s first experience with agrarian life, which he found suited him. At age thirteen, Cao came to the United Stated with his mother and five siblings (part of the wave of so-called “boat people”), settling in Houston, Texas late 1979. Cao attended public high school, then enrolled at the University of Houston College of Architecture, where he studied architecture design for two years before moving to Los Angeles in 1989. He enrolled at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, switching to a landscape architecture major, and graduated with a Bachelors Degree in 1994.

Sharing a rented house with photographer Stephen Jerrome, in 1996 they began work on The Glass Garden, a stylized Vietnamese landscape inspired by Cao’s memories of childhood. Starting with a bucket of crushed glass, they eventually began working with a large glass recycling company, and together perfected the manufacture of smooth glass pebbles for the landscape. The Glass Garden would eventually use 45 tons of recycled glass (and two years of hands-on labor) to create Cao’s first “total environment”.

With Stephen Jerrome’s photographs to showcase their work, the Glass Garden debuted on February 22nd, 1998 as a full page article in the Sunday Los Angeles Times. That summer the Glass Garden caught the attention of the famed fashion boutique Maxfield’s, whose owner, Anne-Marie Dubois Dumee, hired Cao to create a display for the store’s high profile windows on Melrose Avenue. Anne-Marie Dubois Dumee also wrote an article featuring the Glass Garden for the Italian Design magazine, Abitare, (July-August issue #375), which became the first of many magazine pieces. That same summer of 1998, the Glass Garden was featured in a 30 minute show on the Los Angeles PBS television show, “Visiting: With Huell Howser”, which went a long way to cementing Andy Cao’s presence as a locally-based landscape designer.

Soon after, the Glass Garden was featured in dozens of magazines world wide, including House & Garden (1999). Numerous US garden design television shows (on HG-TV, Discovery Channel, etc.) also featured the Glass Garden, as well as segments for programs seen on English and Canadian television.

The work of Andy Cao (and later, Cao-Perrot Studio) has been featured on the cover of several design magazines, including Landscape Architecture (April 2003). Significant books include The Garden Book (October 2005), a compendium of historic gardens; Avant Gardeners, (2008) by acclaimed British garden writer, Tim Richardson (including the cover photograph); 1000x Landscape Architecture (2009); and in 60: Innovators Shaping Our Creative Future, (2009).

Cao and Jerrome’s work with recycled glass won them a research grant from the Charles Lindbergh Foundation (2000) to further explore the product potential of making artful tiles from recycled glass.

The success of Glass Garden also caught the attention of hotelier Andre Balazs, who commissioned Andy Cao to create a glass installations and landscape design for the Standard Hotels (Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles); and to restore the gardens at the historic Chateau Marmont Hotel on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. Cao also created a permanent wall mural within the private gardens of the Chateau Marmont.

In 2001, Cao was recipient of the prestigious Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture and become a lifelong Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (FAAR 2002).

Cao’s work with glass also caught the attention of the glass art community, and he has received several artist residencies at the Pilchuck Glass Art School, north of Seattle, Washington.

In 2001, Cao created a landscape installation titled Desert Sea, at the international Chaumont-sur-Loire Garden Festival, France. There he met the nineteen year old French landscape designer-in-training, Xavier Perrot. When Cao won the Rome Prize Fellowship later that year, he invited Perrot to be his assistant during the fully-funded year at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. Perrot, from Bretagne, came to Rome, where he worked with Andy Cao to create Red Box (later featured on the aforementioned cover of Landscape Architecture Magazine).

Andy Cao taught landscape design at California State Polytechnic University Pomona in Fall 2003 and Winter 2004. In 2004, Cao was represented by art curator Randy Rosenberg (Rosenberg Associates) and created his first temporary public art commission “Cocoons” funded by the City of Emeryville, California. In 2006, Cao joined an international roster of recognized and emerging artists to participate in The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama, also curated by Randy Rosenberg. Cao created “100 Hearts” for the Missing Peace, a traveling exhibition that has shown in museums across the United States and around the world.

Other Cao-Perrot installations at international garden festivals including Jardin des Hesperides (2006) at the Metis International Garden Festival, in Quebec, Canada; and Lullaby Garden (2004) at the Cornerstone Festival of Gardens, Sonoma, California. That major work involved closing their studio for three months and going to Vietnam (Cao’s first time back since childhood) to work with 60 villagers and created 200 sections of hand-knitted carpets, which were then shipped back to the Cornerstone site in the wine country of Northern California and sown together over a hand-sculpted rolling landform.

In 2005, Andy Cao moved to New York City and worked for renowned landscape architect and scholar Diana Balmori, (founding principal of Balmori Associates).

Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot officially formed CaoPerrot Studio in 2006 and were represented by Maryalice Mazzara in New York. Cao Perrot Studio was commissioned to create installations for the Taryn Rose Boutiques in New York, Beverly Hills, Las Vegas, and San Jose, California, and a temporary installation in the lake of the Fairchild Botanical Garden in Miami, Florida.

The work of Cao Perrot Studio was included in the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, “Design Life Now: National Design Triennial”.

In 2007, Cao Perrot Studio won the Material ConneXion Medium Award for Landscape Design in honor of their innovative workings with familiar materials (fishing line, wire mesh, recycled glass, coconuts etc.).

In 2008, Cao Perrot Studio, now with offices in Los Angeles and Paris, were invited to enter an international competition to design a 600 acre Guangming Central Park, Shenzhen, China. As last minute invitees, with only a few weeks to come up with a proposal, Cao Perrot won the competition in July of 2009.

Three significant private commissions followed, including the creation of Cloud I, in the courtyard of the new Headquarters for Paris Fashion house, Kenzo (2008); followed with Cloud II, a permanent art installation in the courtyard of a contemporary private residence overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, California (2009). Aerial Garden, with a stainless steel tree and 5000 mother-of-pearl leaves, was created for Champagne Laurent-Perrier to show at Jardins, Jardin, the Paris spring garden festival, Tuileries Garden, 2009. The installation won Grand Prize, and was presented by Henri Loyrette, President and Director of the Louvre Museum.

Andy Cao taught landscape design at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Architecture in the fall 2009.

In the realms of Public Art, Andy Cao is on the register of 4Culture, the Seattle-based artist’s resource and representative. Two public art commissions in the State of Washington have come by way of this organization, including a permanent earthwork installation titled “Pillow Field” in the White Center district, completed June 2010; and “Cloud”, for the Bow Lake Transfer Station, which is scheduled for completion in 2012.

Another permanent public art installations, “Willow Tree” set in the lake of the new Grand Prairie Central Park in City of Grand Prairie, Texas, will debut August 2010.

Andy Cao is recipient of the prestigious Loeb Fellowship, Class of 2010-2011. He will be a full-time resident at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Cambridge, Massachusetts) in Fall 2010 and Spring 2011.

Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot have been invited to give lectures in the United States and abroad, including Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington; the Tate Gallery, London; GLDA’s 14th International Design Seminar, 2010, at National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland; the American Academy in Rome (New York headquarters); and University of Las Vegas.

Pictures and other information may be seen on Cao-Perrot Studio’s website, caoperrotstudio.com