Shuyi Cao is a New York-based artist whose practice explores alchemical approaches to object making 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 sculptures and installation synthesizes various organic and inorganic materials, natural and artificial processes. Combining hand-crafted and digital artifacts, moving images, and sounds, the assemblage suggests heterogeneous material temporalities. Recent works center on world-making that unravels monstrous intimacy and queer kinship across a myriad of networked life forms and incompatible scales, summoning ontologies that mutate between substances, residues, and impurities.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Today Art Museum, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Long March Space, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Contemporary Gallery Kunming, Chronus Art Center (CAC), New Century Art Foundation (NCAF), Banff Centre for the Arts, Chambers Fine Art, Shin Gallery, Fou Gallery, A.I.R. 13th Biennale, among others. She is the recipient of the Today Art Museum Wang Shikuo Nomination Award, The New School Tishman Environment and Design Center Research Grant, MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists Grant. She is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute, faculty at Parsons School of Design, and has presented at Pioneer Works, NEW INC New Museum, Power Station of Art, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the City University of Hong Kong. She is co-founder of Decompose Institute, an experimental institute for art and science research. She received a Bachelor of Laws, an M.A. in Public Administration from Fudan University in Shanghai, and an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York.


contact@shuyicao.com



✦  Teaching  

Cross-disciplinary Studio: Symbiotic Futures
Graduate Elective: Transmaterial Lab

︎ Archive
Communications Design Graduate Department, Pratt Institute

Seminar/lecture: Sustainable Systems
Art, Design History and Theory, Parsons School of Design

Graduate Electives (2020-2021): Simulated Life; Hypernatural Studio; Fluid Machines
Design and Technology Department, Parsons School of Design


© Shuyi Cao 2023