Wen-You Cai, Looking at Stettheimer at the Met, 2025, inkjet print and antique frames, 26 × 26cm
Wen-You Cai, Pepto Vase, 2023, Ceramics, 25 × 25cm
Wen-You Cai, Archeology Tripod, 2023, Ceramics, 21 × 21cm
Wen-You Cai
From an early age, photography became a way for her to record her existence and relationship to her environment. Wen-You has never approached photography as an art form in the traditional sense, but rather as a visual language that preserves memory — keeping moments spent with friends and family alive and vivid. This personal, documentary impulse underscores her photographic work, transforming everyday experiences into lasting recollections.
In 2015, she published When You Make No Art, a memoir about growing up in museums. The following year, she founded Special Special, a shop, gallery, and creative platform. As director, she has produced over 40 unique collaborations in New York, Shanghai, Taipei, and Macau. Special Special operated from an East Village storefront from 2016 to 2022, and in 2024, it launched 4N, a biannual magazine spotlighting extraordinary foreign talent in America. Today, Special Special continues to evolve through new projects that foster creative communities.
A: First and foremost, everything has to feel genuine, and the motivation needs to be pure. If my heart is in the right place and I follow my intuition, then I can hopefully connect with people in a genuine way through my work and all my endeavors.
I find it essential for everything to develop organically and feel easy. This is not to say hard work is not involved, but it needs to feel like I am moving with the grain and not against it. The entry barrier can’t be too high. If a medium is not natural for me to work with, it’s probably not the right medium or approach for me.
Nothing can be truly done alone, and collaboration is key to fluid thinking and movement. Being in dialogue with other people and reflecting on the broader environment has always been helpful for my process. Other people’s perspectives, channeled in the right way, can help contribute to ideas that one would not necessarily think of alone.
I tend not to have expectations for the outcome of my projects. The journey informs an output that may be better than an idea I initially set out for.
Something I have been working on in recent years is to try to stay on track with projects and improve upon them. In the past, I switched gears between projects so much that I didn’t have many opportunities to hone different elements of one area. Sticking to one thing for longer allows me to push further, providing time and room for improvement, implementing new learning into a project.
Q: How does your practice, or this particular work, engage with or respond to these codes?
A: Both photography and ceramics feel natural to me, and they are mediums I have worked with throughout my life. I find that I am always gathering materials for my art, whether it's taking pictures or finding interesting objects to collect. I am process-oriented and flexible regarding the outcome. I am open to interpretation and never seek perfection, only alignment.
With photography, I have developed a recalcitrant approach to art-making by taking pictures wherever I go. In this body of work, each photograph has been assigned a vintage frame, transforming the picture into an object. The process to make this work is like a scavenger hunt where the image and frame must align to turn the photograph into a one-of-a-kind piece. It’s a curatorial process and a form of readymade, where I assemble materials I already have to create the work.
Making ceramics is also an intuitive practice for me, where every work is different but a delightful surprise. I don’t have much of a plan for how I want my work to be, and through a collaborative process with the clay, I shape it into what it wants to be. I never know what the final outcome is until it is dried, fired, and glazed. I am happy to surrender this lack of control and see it as a dialogue with the medium.
Q: How do you navigate the balance between individuality and collective life — finding and standing by your own voice while also being connected to and supported by others?
A: As a founder of Special Special, a creative platform for collaboration, I realize many ideas don’t come about on their own and are improved through brainstorming and dialogue with others. As I developed my Special Special platform, I also realized it’s important to have an outlet that is purely for me to create, so as not to compete with other people’s ideas, especially when I am interested in having my distinct voice heard. It’s important to have different modalities to share a voice. With all my projects, there is an element of collaboration, whether in the collective form for 4N Magazine, book making where I work with editors and publishers, ceramics made in a studio where technicians help to fire the pieces, or being inspired by my surroundings that I’d like to capture into a picture. Some ideas are stronger in a collective form, and some come about stronger as an independent voice. Regardless, there’s an element of collaboration in all my work. It’s a matter of whether I am the artist or I’m part of a collective entity to produce the project.
Q: What has your path as an artist revealed to you about resilience, belonging, or empowerment in your own life?
A: My journey has been driven by a desire to be creative and produce work that resonates with my authentic self, rather than adhering to the conventional path of an artist. I’ve always followed what speaks to me.
Each artistic endeavor serves as a means of self-understanding. I've consistently felt a powerful need to express my true self, and the more I create, the more my work empowers me. It becomes a genuine expression of who I am, and a vehicle for deeper self-discovery. The resulting artwork takes on a life of its own, offering a reflection for me to study and for others to understand me through. I embrace various interpretations, allowing for a flexible discourse that can introduce new, unforeseen ideas.
Growing up with a multicultural background, I never fully saw myself reflected in my peers, nor did I have a perfect role model. This motivated me to understand myself better and to potentially create a space for like-minded individuals to find a sense of belonging. This pursuit of building a less lonely and more fulfilling space has fueled my creative practices. The more I learn about myself through life and art, the more I connect with others and find a sense of belonging.
Q: Can you share what guided your choice of the work included in Unspoken Codes, and what you hope it might evoke for viewers?
A: My ceramic work is a meditative process, allowing me to quiet external distractions and focus my mind and hands on creating unique, functional pieces. Handbuilding offers me the freedom to express myself internally, resulting in vessels I use in my daily life.
From a young age, I’ve used point-and-shoot film photography to capture curious moments. The photographs presented here are personal reflections from family funerals and museum visits — ongoing themes in my work. These photos serve as a time capsule and a relaxed way for me to generate artistic materials. I pair them with antique frames, adding a dimension of history and context that transforms a reproducible medium into a unique sculptural object.
Some of these frames, found in antique stores, originally contained Americana landscapes, served as souvenirs from local businesses, complete with silhouettes and thermometers. I replaced their original images with personal photographs from family funerals or museums, creating a personal narrative within objects that have a distinct history.
Both mediums offer a glimpse into my personal history and aesthetics.