Presented in both English and Chinese, this marks the artist's first monographic publication, featuring Shuyi's artworks, research notes, essays, and her conversations and written exchanges with friends and art writers over the past few years.
Offspring of Stone is an amulet series conceived as a condensed embodiment of Ardour for Unconformity, objects activated through proximity, touch, and bodily presence. Where the book maps unconformity across deep time and diasporic histories, Offspring of Stone renders these inquiries tactile, translating a speculative atlas into material intimacy.
The series emerges from a sustained engagement with glass as a volatile, time-bearing material, one that registers pressure, rupture, and incompatibility rather than resolving them. Each fragment carries layered histories: the mineral composition of its raw materials, the conditions of industrial manufacture, cycles of use and discard, and the prolonged abrasion of water and sediment. Within the kiln, these disparate glasses are subjected to controlled cycles of heat and cooling. Expanding and contracting at uneven rates, the materials fracture. Often dismissed as technical failures, these fissures become the structural and conceptual core of the work, tracing lines of refusal and misalignment. They embody unconformity as both a geological and cultural condition: gaps in time, ruptures in continuity, and the uneasy coexistence of incommensurable systems.
Ardor for Unconformity
Artist book
2026
An artist book by Shuyi Cao that synthesizes her visual poetry, material processes, and multi-scale world-making.
The publication is a limited edition of 100 copies, each accompanied by an amulet from the artist's ongoing "Offspring of Stone" series.
Uniquely handcrafted by Shuyi, each amulet serves as a wearable sculpture. The glass fragments are sourced from shorelines across various geographies, including the lesser-visited post-industrial waterfronts of Brooklyn, New York, where the artist lives and works. This connection allows local terrains and personal relationships to subtly infuse the works’ material memory.
Content:
Essays, visual poetry and diagrams by Shuyi Cao.
Collaborative writing by Shuyi Cao and Yuhang Zhang.
Conversation between Shuyi Cao and Penny Yiou Peng.
Amulet from Offspring of Stone, unique edition per book
Graphic Design:
Xinyao Huang
Publisher:
Gong Press (New York & Beijing)
Shuyi Cao: Ardor for Unconformity
《曹舒怡：错爱》
Published by Gong Press in 2026
Limited Edition, 100 Copies, in English and Chinese.
Inquiry --> Gong Press
*The preview version of the book is released in June 2024 with limited Edition of 10, as part of the artist’s solo exhibition at the 11th Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine in Quebec.