ShuyiCao Gathering

Shuyi Cao Winding without shore 25 Apr – 7 Jun jpeg) GATHERING 5 Warwick Street jpeg) jpeg) | | | | --- | --- | --- | Shuyi Cao: Winding without Shore Curated by Stavroula Coulianidis Evening light falls through the industrial window panes of Shuyi Cao’s Brooklyn studio, making the sun-bleached exoskeleton of the horseshoe crab she holds appear translucent. “There’s no meat left,” she says, “it’s like a ” Ghosts, or the traces of living, moving things, abound in Cao’s space: dried seed pods, sea shells foraged from shorelines and shellfish dinners, coprolites (fossilised manure), driftwood and pebbles smoothed by the tide.

She picks them up and handles them gently. “The things I collect, I don’t always know whether they are alive or ” She shows me a milkweed pod that had erupted into floss after sitting in the studio for months, seemingly lifeless. With a shake, Cao sends silken gossamer dancing through the still air. Even what we call inanimate things have charges, weights. They are attracted to each other or repulse each other. They have force and velocity, heat and viscosity. They fall down, rise up. They form into clouds and then disappear into thin air.

[1] For archaeologist Ian Hodder, things are “just stages in the process of the transformation of matter”; Cao’s collection and treatment of the objects she finds testifies to the endless vacillation between petrification and fluidity that defines our material world. [2] In Milkweed (2025), Cao blows up the reawakened seed casing to Jurassic scale, using digital scans and 3D printing to reimagine the papery husks in steel, hand painted lilac-grey. Each pod is a vessel for a milk-white filament structure of borosilicate glass: an arrested form of the plant’s latex sap, or a calcified skeleton of the floss that sends milkweed seeds adrift.

The attenuated prongs of Wind Claw (2025) take their shape from the seed capsules of the Devil’s Claw, a propagation mechanism that evolved to encircle and snag the feet of Ice Age megafauna. Now, the claws hold an emptiness at their core: the negative space for something that used to exist. Movement is stilled, for the time being. But one can never really be certain that there is not a kernel of life left over; of something that continues to wriggle and grow. The shells that Cao grafts to driftwood and steel in her Xenophora sculptures must be cleaned after they’re gathered.

She soaks the turret-like shells of sea- snails in water for days, and dries them in the sun before polishing them, mimicking the erosion enacted by the sea. Sometimes a morsel of meat escapes this process, and Cao finds maggots hiding inside the whorls. She starts the cleaning again. The artist’s family and friends save the shells for her after they eat sea snails, clams or oysters; Xenophora I and II (both 2024) are inscribed with eating practices that stretch from New York to China. Aptly, Cao describes the preparatory elements of her practice in metabolic terms.

She consumes leftovers proffered by her environment and relationships, digesting them through physical and digital treatment processes: cleaning, drying, scanning, grafting, printing and painting are her enzymes. Dried mango peel becomes a spiny shell casing; shards of discarded Evian bottles look like butterfly wings. Cao’s collecting and making practice establishes her sculptures as participants in the human ecosystem that connects the self with the city. Things are consumed and their remnants are discarded or excreted, making their way back into the environmental fabric to break down or lie dormant – maybe to be picked up and used again.

A portion of Cao’s materials come from Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, the site of a horse processing plant in the 19th century, before becoming a landfill from the 1920s to the 1950s. Now, it is a place where thick green glass from mid-century beer bottles mingles with chunks of horse bone and plastic waste, an amalgam of organic and synthetic material bound together by its shared, interminable survival. In Of Shape Offshore (2023), Cao films miniature landscapes formed from reconstituted material collected from the bay, turning “that which the sea rejects” into fictional topographies that pulsate and glow like bacteria under a microscope.

Things get associated with each other as they move through common life-histories, at times leading to joint discard – all the parts of a meal, or all the sweepings from around a hearth, or all the contents of a room or house discarded together. Things are mixed in middens and land-fills. Things may be further mixed together as flesh rots, buildings decay, roofs collapse, and as deposits are washed down slopes. [3] What will we look like as left-over life forms? In Begin with the End of What Comes Before (2024), Cao uses a mixture of hand-modelled digital animation and AI generation to imagine our future remains: scorched mountain ranges, bruise-coloured rock formations, mycelial passageways slick with chemical secretion.

We often think about archaeology as a thread of connection between us and the deep past: sherds from before the Common Era, or Bronze Age arrowheads. In Winding without Shore, Cao presents us with an archaeology that combines recent and distant pasts with imagined futures, threaded together by quicksilver streams. Text by Sybilla Griffin [1] Ian Hodder, Entanglement, 2012 pg. 4 [2] Ian Hodder, Entanglement, 2012 pg. 4 [3] Ian Hodder, Entanglement, 2012 pg. 43 Stavroula Coulianidis is a New York-based independent curator. She is the founder of STAV, a curatorial organization dedicated to exhibiting emerging and rediscovered artists with international galleries and institutions.

Her projects have been reviewed by The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn jpeg) Wind claw 2025 Stainless steel and acrylic paint 50 x 81 x 89 cm 18,000 USD excl. VAT jpeg) | | | | --- | --- | --- jpeg) Xenophora II 2024 Driftwood, rocks, minerals, dried seeds, oyster and clam shells, coral, seashell fragments, fish scale, fishbone, mango pit, glass, recycled plastic, resin, steel and acrylic paint 142 x 76 x 56 cm 16,500 USD excl. VAT | | | | | --- | --- | --- | jpeg) | | | | --- | --- | --- |

| | | | | --- | --- | --- | Xenophora I 2024 Driftwood, mussel shells, oyster shells, fish bones, sea glass, rock conglomerates, epoxy clay and acrylic paint 61 x 91 x 150 cm 18,500 USD excl. VAT jpeg) | | | | --- | --- | --- | jpeg) | | | | --- | --- | --- | jpeg) | | | | --- | --- | --- jpeg) Every name carries a deity (stone bloomer) 2023 Rocks, minerals, driftwood, oyster and clam shells, seashell fragments, horseshoe crab, ceramic, glass, barnacles, weathered rubber, recycled plastic, resin, metal and acrylic paint

50 x 56 x 81 cm 13,000 USD excl. VAT | | | | | --- | --- | --- jpeg) The Other Writing (like the semisolid in the chrysalis) 2024 Aqua resin, aluminum, crushed abalone shell, opal, stone and wood 43 x 63 x 10 cm 9,000 USD excl. VAT | | | | | --- | --- | --- jpeg) Begin with the end of what comes before, 2024 One channel video with sound Edition of 5 + 1 AP 8 minutes 45 seconds 7,500 USD excl. VAT Of Shape Offshore 2023 One channel video with sound Edition of 5 + 1 AP 13 mins 55 secs 5,000 USD excl.

VAT Shuyi Cao (b. 1990 Guangzhou, China) Lives and works in New York, USA Shuyi Cao is a New York-based artist whose practice explores alchemical approaches to material, matter and knowledge osmosis. Through archeological speculation and ecological fiction, she contemplates the porous plurality of relations between sciences, technocultures, mythologies, and cosmologies. Her multi-medium sculpture and installation traverse enormous and microscopic scales, involving more/less/other-than human worlds. Her making methods synthesize dynamic spatiotemporal configuration and material transformation, from ceramic and glass making with wild clay, sand, mineral, and earth elements to digital fabrication such as 3D printing and virtual environment simulation.

Combining hand-crafted objects, technological artifacts, and moving images, she creates paradoxical fossils - tangible and intangible - as portals to meditate geotrauma, transcorporeal ecology and prehistoric futurity. Her work has been shown internationally, including recent solo shows Ardor for Unconformity (2024) at 11th Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine, Quebec, Undercurrent Softness (2023) at Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai, a duo show Strange Stranger (2023) at Para Site, Hong Kong; and group exhibitions at He Art Museum, Foshan (2023), TAG Museum (Qingdao), Aranya Art Centre, Beidaihe (2023), Hyundai Motorstudio, Beijing (2023), Chronus Art Centre, Shanghai (2022), Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai (2021), Today Art Museum, Beijing (2021), NARS Foundation, New York (2021).

She is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute and founder of Transmaterial Lab, and held positions as artist-in-residency at Guangdong Times Museum, Banff Centre for the Art, New Museum NEW INC, Power Station of Art Shanghai and The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. She received a Bachelor of Laws, an A. in Public Administration from Fudan University in Shanghai, and an A. in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York. Solo and Group Exhibitions 2025 (Upcoming) Winding without shore, Gathering, London, UK (Upcoming) Underwater, On Fire, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Yixing, China (Upcoming) Mad Heart, Be Brave, Fridman Gallery, New York, USA (Upcoming Group Show) Base Materialism, Albion Jeune, London, UK Braided Stream, Bank/MABSOCIETY NYC, New York, USA Unearthed, Orange County Museum of Art, California, USA 2024 And When The Sea Was Open, Island Gallery, New York, USA Ardor for Unconformity, The 11th Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine (BNSC), Québec, Canada Alien, David Castillo, Miami, USA Jing’an International Sculpture Project (JISP), Jing’an Sculpture Park, Shanghai, China Tangent Media, Gravity Field Ar Gallery, Shenzhen, China Pulse of the Hinterland, The 4th Xinjiang International Art Biennale 2024, Xinjiang Art Museum, Urumqi, China Unidentified Object, Song Art Museum, Beijing, China Re-Enchantement, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France Weirding Worlds, PODIUM, Hong Kong 2023 Undercurrent Softness, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China Strange Stranger, with Leelee Chan, Para Site, Hong Kong How Far How Close, Aranya Art Center, Beidaihe, China Metamorphic Ecosphere, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, China Seaward, TAG Art Museum, China Tales of the South, He Art Museum (HEM), China Offworlds, YveYang Gallery, New York, USA Learning to read from lips and stones, Below Grand Gallery, New York, USA Melting Rock, Still Wind, Yamanaka Suplex, Osaka, Japan Awards, Residencies and Grants 2024 Waves Across the South, Guangdong Times Museum Art & Research Residency, Guangzhou, China 2023 Finalists of “The 2nd TAG-New Contemporary”, TAG Art Museum, Qingdao, China 2022 Material Transformations, Visual Arts Residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada 2021 Today Art Museum WANG SHIKUO Nomination Award, Beijing, China Research Grant, Tishman Environment and Design Center, The New School, USA NARS Foundation International Artist Residency Program, New York, USA Blue Cables in Venetian Watercourses, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China 2020 Creative Science Track at NEW INC, New Museum, USA Hyundai Blue Prize 2020 finalist, Beijing, China 2018 Community Outreach Grant, MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists program Silicate Soundscapes, UrbanGlass, New York, USA MASS MoCA Studio Residency, North Adams, USA Steadfastly Revise for the Standards in Nonproductive Construction (Part II: Liquid Flow), Long March Space, Beijing, China Terrains of Skin, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China 2022 Shadow Metabolism, Hazel and Robert Siegel Gallery, Pratt Institute, New York, USA The Language of Mushrooms, Contemporary Gallery Kunming, Yunnan, China Entangled: bio/media, Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, China Chthonic Spoil, Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada Matter Matters, Chambers Fine Art, New York, USA 2021 Utterance, NARS Art Foundation, New York Reshape, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China Do Not Black Out, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, China Blue Cables in Venetian Watercourse, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China 2019 Let’s try listening again: 13th

R. Biennial, R. Gallery, New York, USA 2018 Artificial River Has No Memories, site-specific installation, MASS MoCA, North Adams, USA Growing Pebbles, SLEEPCENTER Gallery, New York, USA The Hybrid of Beings, Westbeth Gallery, New York, USA