Shuyi Cao

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

My practice explores how matter carries histories and changes as it moves between biological, geological, and technological systems. Working from organisms, fragments, and residues encountered along shorelines and other shifting landscapes, I move between material and computational processes to create sculptures, installations, and archaeological fictions. I am drawn to forms shaped through accumulation and interdependence: mollusks that attach foreign matter to their shells, microorganisms that mineralize soft bodies, lichens sustained through symbiosis, and debris altered by tides, erosion, and human movement. These structures offer ways of thinking about bodies not as fixed entities, but as compositions continually formed through contact with their surroundings. I treat translation across scale, material, and technology as a form of metabolism. A microscopic structure may become architectural; reclaimed glass may return to a mineral or shell-like state; fragments from different places may gather into a body without a singular origin. Each translation brings distinct histories, geographies, and temporalities into relation while retaining traces of what came before. At other times, the work expands from object into environment, allowing light, weather, moving image, and architecture to become active conditions of encounter. Across these forms, distinctions between organism and artifact, natural history and technological image, body and landscape begin to loosen. I think...

Artwork