New York–based artist Shuyi Cao transforms raw materials into time-spanning sculptures that bridge geology, ecology and technology. In #VEINDIGITAL we speak with the artist. Experience her immersive vision from June 25–29 at FECOEV.
Portrait of Shuyi Cao. Photography by Maria Santo. Courtesy of Gathering and the artist.
This year’s CAN ART Ibiza will turn FECOEV into a global art hub, uniting over thirty galleries from Europe, Asia and the Americas. Among its most anticipated participants is Shuyi Cao, whose practice—shaped by a background in law, public administration and fine art—fuses hand-crafted ceramics and glass with recycled detritus, 3D printing, AI and virtual simulation into what she calls “polyphonic assemblages” that question our sense of material, time and the human–nonhuman divide.
Stepping inside her installation, one immediately senses an experimental rigor: Cao explains that “My practice is based on alchemical approaches to meaning-making and material transformation. My work encompasses mixed-media sculpture, installation, and video, combining hand-crafted and digital artefacts.” She goes on to describe how this “alchemical” method draws on a vast palette of elements—traditional ceramics and glass, urban debris, plastics, alongside 3D-printed and virtual components—each “embody[ing] its own temporality,” from the eons of geological formation to the split-second precision of code.
Shuyi Cao Salines, 2025 – Coral bone, driftwood, seashells, limestone, bottle glass, rubber, recycled plastic, resin, paint 72.07 × 73.02 × 45.08 cm. Photography by Maria Santo. Courtesy of Gathering and the artist.
That split-second precision proves indispensable when she needs to render forms beyond the reach of hand alone. As Cao notes, “Digital tools operate on compressed timelines and offer greater precision,” a capability that allows her to conjure structures otherwise impossible, and to layer them into her sculptural narratives.
On Ibiza’s shores, she turned her alchemical curiosity outward, gathering both organic and synthetic fragments. “During my residency in Ibiza, I created a piece using materials sourced locally. It is part of an ongoing series of sculptures that blend organic forms with synthetic detritus, including rocks, driftwood, seashell fragments, and plastic waste, collected from shorelines,” Cao recalls, pointing out that these works “evoke natural growths like barnacles and coral reefs, shape-shifting without imposing a hierarchy between the natural and the artificial.” Confronted with remarkably clean, tourism-maintained beaches, she improvised by “turn[ing] to local restaurants to recycle imported shells from consumed seafood,” ultimately naming the work after the beach where the plastic shards were found—Salines—a “quiet snapshot of Ibiza’s evolving ecosystem, one that feels increasingly artificial, curated, and dislocated from its natural rhythms.”
Installation View: Shuyi Cao: Winding without Shore (25 Apr – 7 Jun 2025), Gathering, London, UK. Photography by Maria Santo. Courtesy of Gathering and the artist. 
Shuyi Cao Milkweed, 2025 – Stainless steel, glass, acrylic paint 100 × 73 × 45 cm. Photography by Ollie Hammick. Courtesy of Gathering and the artist. 
Shuyi Cao Wind claw, 2025 – Stainless steel, glass, acrylic paint 89 × 50 × 81 cm. Photography by Ollie Hammick. Courtesy of Gathering and the artist.
But material alchemy is only half the story. Underpinning her sculptures is a conceptual architecture built on what she calls “archaeological speculation” and “ecological fiction.” These frameworks, she says, “traverse geological deep time and microscopic scales to reposition the human within a broader network of relations,” weaving science, myth and technoculture into “polyphonic assemblages” of hybrid lifeforms, origin stories and nonhuman actors—models of coexistence beyond linear, discipline-bound narratives.
Shuyi Cao: Winding without Shore (25 Apr – 7 Jun 2025), Gathering, London, UK. Photography by Ollie Hammick Courtesy of Gathering and the artist
Finally, Cao emphasizes that her alchemy is not a one-way street but a continual dialogue: “The relationship between concept, material, and technique in my work is iterative and reciprocal. In some projects, I begin with site-specific materials, such as wild clay, minerals, or other organic matter, to trace the geological and biological histories embedded in a place. In other works involving speculative or fictional entities, digital tools allow me to manipulate scale and form in ways that disrupt familiarity and envision forms that lie outside existing representations. Yet the boundary between analog and digital is never fixed; these modes of making continuously inform and transform one another, reflecting the increasing entanglement of matter and technology in our world. My process remains intuitive and adaptive; an alchemy in its own right.”
By marrying earth-derived media with cutting-edge technologies, Shuyi Cao turns CAN ART Ibiza 2025 into a realm where past and future converge beneath Balearic light—an invitation to witness material metamorphoses ripple across time and scale.
Shuyi Cao Xenophora I, 2024 – Driftwood, mussel shells, oyster shells, fish bones, sea glass, rock conglomerates, epoxy clay, acrylic paint 150 × 61 × 91 cm. Photography by Ollie Hammick. Courtesy of Gathering and the artist.
Don’t miss out—buy your tickets for CAN ART Ibiza 2025 here.
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