Williston’s Yuwei Cao ’16 and Mike Hong ’16, together with their outside partners, have already raised $14,000 for charity since the inauguration of their art auction website in 2014.

CLC Art grew from an idea Cao had of forming a young artist collective. The idea evolved from a group of friends into a website to auction art and donate the proceeds to non-profit charity organizations.

Yuwei Cao described the conception of CLC Art, “I had a painting my sophomore year that someone wanted to buy and I started to see the market in school and among other artists.”

The website CLC Art was founded with Cao’s childhood friends, Yichen Cai, who currently studies computer science at Queens University in Canada and Maizie Luo, who started at the Maryland Institute of Design this year. Cai is responsible for the technological aspects of the website while Luo brought her experience with non-profit organizations and her passion for art to the group.

The mutual passion for art inspired the profound project, “We could turn our artwork, our effort, and our love back to the community and do something real,” Cao declared.

The influence of Luo’s mother, who founded an art news website in china, helped inspire them to transform their idea into a website. Cao explained that “during the time of the website’s creation we had 3 hour [conference] calls about 3 times a week with Luo’s mother and she taught us a lot.”

Luo previously worked with LA’s Best, a Los Angeles-based organization that provides safe after-school programs for children. The art afternoon program at LA’s Best became the first to benefit from the websites proceeds.

Since the website’s debut, they have expanded their donations to include Rain and Star, a Chinese program for children with autism, and Heart Spring, a U.S program for autistic children. CLC Art hopes to reach out to more organizations in the future.

The process of founding the site took planning and significant preparation from Cao and her partners. A year of working with third party web designers, financing, learning about how an online auction works and building connections with artists finally came to fruition for Yuwei Cao’ at Williston in 2014 when they opened the website with their first auction.

Since the first auction, Williston Senior Mike Hong ’16 has joined the team. He manages the sites finances and helps to advertise and operate the site. Yuwei Cao admits to working several hours every day trying to maintain the site and expressed that Hong’s contributions have helped to even out the work.

Using the social media platform WeChat, they are able to market the site to potential buyers and build relationships with donating artists.

This online network enabled CLC Art to raise over $7,000 in the sites first three auctions. Now in the 4th auction, that began January 1st, CLC Art has already passed $6,500.

Cao explained how the art auction industry can be difficult to navigate because of the evolving market and the changing expectations of artists.

Student from Colombia University, Shaun Wang, who studies art history and the art auction industry, presented a few challenges in the field to Cao at a communications conference for artists that Cao attended over the winter.

He explained that so far in his research he’s found that, “Online art auctions can sometimes be difficult to bring to a higher level.”

He disclosed to Cao,” More and more artists are pursuing higher profits for their works.”

In college, Cao hopes to learn and further explore the field. She believes in order to continue with CLC Art, it is important to obtain of a broad understanding of the culture and market.