Installation view. Faisandage, G Gallery, Seoul. Jul. 1 - 31, 2026.
Many others unnamed, 2026. Stainless steel, 15 x 14 x 20 in / 38 x 35.5 x 51 cm.
Stone enters me, 2026. Stainless steel, 23.5 x 20.5 x 13.5 in / 60 x 52 x 34 cm.
Before root, 2026. Stainless steel, 12.5 x 18 x 18 inches / 32 x 46 x 46 cm.
A weather of beings, 2026. Stainless steel, glass. 24.5 x 36 x 16 in / 62 x 91 x 40 cm.Sea Lung [1], the hybrid organism imagined by Shuyi Cao, makes its home on surfaces, whether they are cliffs formed by the rising of the earth, trenches sunk deep beneath the sea, or buildings humans have erected by recombining minerals. Seeping into their cracks, it transforms states at the pace of its own expansive life cycle, much like moss occupying for a long time on bare rock, slowly turning stone into soil. The time of seawater coming and going, the time of metal rusting, and the time of sand becoming glass overlap in ways that cannot simply be called slow or fast, gradually becoming the place itself from the surface inward. It is less a form than a state, less an individual being than a relationship, and closer to a process that lets us sense the pace at which the matter before our eyes becomes something else over a very long time.
Some of the shells that become central figures for Shuyi’s work, including Sea Lung, come from her hometown, a coastal city known for its seafood market. After meals, her family would carefully wash the leftover shells, dry them, stack them neatly, and keep them until she returned home from overseas, when they would hand them to her. Shells that had once held living flesh pass from the table, through the hands of family, across the sea, and arrive in her studio in New York. Shuyi creates 3D scans these shells, reconstructs them in digital space, and casts them in glass. The family one comes from and the self. The place one has left and the place one has settled. Sea and land. Shell and glass. Digital scanning and physical casting. In this way, the shell moves into glass, and glass remembers sand—its mineral origin.
[1] A hybrid being that combines a Southeast Asian sea snail with lungwort lichen, a species found across North America, where the artist currently lives.