Gathering is thrilled to announce Winding without Shore, Shuyi Cao's first show with the gallery, opening in London 25 Apr, 6-8 pm.

Evening light falls through the industrial window panes of Shuyi Cao’s Brooklyn studio, making the sun-bleached exoskeleton of the horseshoe crab she holds appear translucent. “There’s no meat left,” she says, “it’s like a ghost.” Ghosts, or the traces of living, moving things, abound in Cao’s space: dried seed pods, sea shells foraged from shorelines and shellfish dinners, coprolites (fossilised manure), driftwood and pebbles smoothed by the tide. She picks them up and handles them gently. “The things I collect, I don’t always know whether they are alive or dead.” She shows me a milkweed pod that had erupted into floss after sitting in the studio for months, seemingly lifeless. With a shake, Cao sends silken gossamer dancing through the still air.

Even what we call inanimate things have charges, weights. They are attracted to each other or repulse each other. They have force and velocity, heat and viscosity. They fall down, rise up. They form into clouds and then disappear into thin air. [1]

Selected Works (17 images)

For archaeologist Ian Hodder, things are “just stages in the process of the transformation of matter”; Cao’s collection and treatment of the objects she finds testifies to the endless vacillation between petrification and fluidity that defines our material world. [2] In Milkweed (2025), Cao blows up the reawakened seed casing to Jurassic scale, using digital scans and 3D printing to reimagine the papery husks in steel, hand painted lilac-grey. Each pod is a vessel for a milk-white filament structure of borosilicate glass: an arrested form of the plant’s latex sap, or a calcified skeleton of the floss that sends milkweed seeds adrift. The attenuated prongs of Wind Claw (2025) take their shape from the seed capsules of the Devil’s Claw, a propagation mechanism that evolved to encircle and snag the feet of Ice Age megafauna. Now, the claws hold an emptiness at their core: the negative space for something that used to exist. Movement is stilled, for the time being.

Installation Views (2 images)

But one can never really be certain that there is not a kernel of life left over; of something that continues to wriggle and grow. The shells that Cao grafts to driftwood and steel in her Xenophora sculptures must be cleaned after they’re gathered. She soaks the turret-like shells of sea-snails in water for days, and dries them in the sun before polishing them, mimicking the erosion enacted by the sea. Sometimes a morsel of meat escapes this process, and Cao finds maggots hiding inside the whorls. She starts the cleaning again.

The artist’s family and friends save the shells for her after they eat sea snails, clams or oysters; Xenophora I and II (both 2024) are inscribed with eating practices that stretch from New York to China. Aptly, Cao describes the preparatory elements of her practice in metabolic terms. She consumes leftovers proffered by her environment and relationships, digesting them through physical and digital treatment processes: cleaning, drying, scanning, grafting, printing and painting are her enzymes. Dried mango peel becomes a spiny shell casing; shards of discarded Evian bottles look like butterfly wings.

Cao’s collecting and making practice establishes her sculptures as participants in the human ecosystem that connects the self with the city. Things are consumed and their remnants are discarded or excreted, making their way back into the environmental fabric to break down or lie dormant – maybe to be picked up and used again. A portion of Cao’s materials come from Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, the site of a horse processing plant in the 19th century, before becoming a landfill from the 1920s to the 1950s. Now, it is a place where thick green glass from mid-century beer bottles mingles with chunks of horse bone and plastic waste, an amalgam of organic and synthetic material bound together by its shared, interminable survival. In Of Shape Offshore (2023), Cao films miniature landscapes formed from reconstituted material collected from the bay, turning “that which the sea rejects” into fictional topographies that pulsate and glow like bacteria under a microscope.

Things get associated with each other as they move through common life-histories, at times leading to joint discard – all the parts of a meal, or all the sweepings from around a hearth, or all the contents of a room or house discarded together. Things are mixed in middens and land-fills. Things may be further mixed together as flesh rots, buildings decay, roofs collapse, and as deposits are washed down slopes. [3]

What will we look like as left-over life forms? In Begin with the End of What Comes Before (2024), Cao uses a mixture of hand-modelled digital animation and AI generation to imagine our future remains: scorched mountain ranges, bruise-coloured rock formations, mycelial passageways slick with chemical secretion.

We often think about archaeology as a thread of connection between us and the deep past: sherds from before the Common Era, or Bronze Age arrowheads. In Winding without Shore, Cao presents us with an archaeology that combines recent and distant pasts with imagined futures, threaded together by quicksilver streams.