Her work, which includes video, performance, and digital media, examines the daily life of Chinese citizens born after the Cultural Revolution.

[2] Cao has captured the rapid social and cultural transformation of contemporary China, highlighting the impact of foreign influences from the United States and Japan.

[6] The Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, is featuring Cao's single channel video People’s Limbo in RMB City (2009) in Worlds Apart, a digital media exhibition in 2025.

[8] During her time there, Cao presented her first performance work, The Little Spark (1998), set in the affiliated Middle School of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

"[11] The artist noted that Burners, a two-minute video focusing on the theme of human desire, "demonstrates the presence of privacy in soft porn and parodies the notion of male narcissism.

"[10] Cao focused on the modern paradox of China's rapid economic growth and social marginalization, producing the 2003 experimental documentary San Yuan Li (三元里) with Ou Ning.

Shot in a rural village nestled in the industrial skyline of Guangzhou, the film examines the effects of development on traditional agrarian lifestyles.

It explores the contrast between the everyday experiences and the aspirations of assembly line workers at a light bulb factory in the Pearl River Delta region of China.

The videos feature China Tracy and Hug Yue in both realistic and fantastic locations, conversational excerpts, and the revelation of "First Life" identities.

[3] Launched in 2008, and open to the public since January 2009, RMB City is a platform for experimental creative activities, one in which Cao and her collaborators use different mediums to test the boundaries between virtual and physical existence.

[20] In 2022, Cao was commissioned by the museum in progress to create a new work for the ongoing series of artistic interventions to the on-stage safety curtain at the Vienna State Opera.