Shuyi Cao is a New York-based artist and researcher 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. Her 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. Combining hand-crafted objects, technological artifacts, and moving images, she creates paradoxical fossils - tangible and intangible - as portals to meditate geotrauma, trans-corporeality and prehistoric futurity.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including recent solo and duo exhibitions at Hive Center for Contemporary Art and Para Site, group exhibitions at Today Art Museum, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Long March Space, Contemporary Gallery Kunming, Chronus Art Center, Banff Centre for the Arts, UrbanGlass NY, Chambers Fine Art, Shin Gallery, Fou Gallery, A.I.R. 13th Biennale, MASS MoCA, 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 and founder of Transmaterial Lab, faculty at Parsons School of Design, alumni of NEW INC New Museum. She is the co-founder of Decompose Institute, an experimental institute for art and science research, and has presented research at Pioneer Works, Power Station of Art, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the City University of Hong Kong.
 
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

© Shuyi Cao 2023