Origins of Practice A conversation between Wen-You Cai, Letra Muerta's Faride Mereb and Oriana Nuzzi， moderated by Jiaoyang Li
A conversation between Wen-You Cai and Letra Muerta's Faride Mereb & Oriana Nuzzi, moderated by Jiaoyang Li
Friday, August 21, 2026 · 6:30–8:30pm · Accent
To accompany Wen-You Cai's solo exhibition This Is Me Looking, on view at Accent from August 6–30, we're hosting a special evening conversation with Wen-You and the two directors of Venezuelan publishing house and design studio Letra Muerta, editor Farida Mereb and designer Oriana Nuzzi,moderated by Accent co-founder and poet Jiaoyang Li.
The three will trace the origins of Wen-You's practice and walk through her recent work across photography, ceramics, and community-building, including 4N, the magazine she publishes through her studio Special Special for foreign-born creatives navigating life and visa status in the U.S. Faride and Oriana will also give a first look at the book Letra Muerta is set to publish with Wen-You in 2027, alongside a broader introduction to Letra Muerta's other publications, their editorial approach to working with authors and artists, their exhibition and archive space in New York, and their long-standing interest in building community across Latin American and Chinese diasporic circles.
The evening is open to anyone drawn to photography, art book publishing, or the Asian Latin American creative community. We'll be serving Chinese and Venezuelan snacks, and a portion of proceeds from the event will go to earthquake relief efforts in Venezuela, following the devastating June 2026 earthquakes that struck the country's northern coast.
About the Guests
Wen-You Cai is an artist, curator, and writer based in New York. Chinese, born in Japan, and raised in New York, her cross-cultural upbringing runs through everything she makes. She's a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and Goldsmiths College. In 2015 she published her memoir When You Make No Art, on growing up in museums, later translated into Chinese as 可不可以不艺术 and published by Imaginist in China. In 2016 she founded Special Special, a shop, gallery, and creative platform that produced more than 40 artist collaborations out of its East Village storefront between 2016 and 2022; the anthology A Small Pond Under the Blue Sky commemorates that run. In 2024, Special Special launched 4N, a biannual magazine spotlighting extraordinary foreign talent in America and creative migration worldwide — built in part as a resource for foreign artists navigating the O-1 "extraordinary ability" visa process. Photography has been Wen-You's throughline since childhood, a way of recording her existence and her ties to the people around her. Her 2019 solo show Rooster Tiger Sheep by Snake (MGM Cotai, Macau) drew on twelve years of family photographs; her 2024 book Minnan Exit, published by te editions, documents family funerals photographed across the Minnan tradition in Quanzhou, Fujian. Her work has shown at the Bonnefantenmuseum (Maastricht), Alisan Fine Arts (Hong Kong), Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Xiamen), On Sundays at Watarium (Tokyo), Cafe China (NY), and de Gournay (NY), among others.
Faride Mereb (b. 1989, Valencia, Venezuela) is a Venezuelan editor, book designer, and researcher based in New York, and the founder of Ediciones Letra Muerta, which she started in Caracas in 2014. Her early work assembling and designing two collections of poet Miyó Vestrini's writing earned wide recognition, including gold in the editorial category at the Latin American Design Awards. She has since won the 2024 Grand Prix for best book design at the same awards, been named best design studio in Venezuela, held a visiting scholar appointment at Columbia University, and now teaches as an adjunct professor at Yale. She's a member of the Bibliographical Society of America and the American Printing History Association.
Oriana Nuzzi is a designer and co-director of Letra Muerta, born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and now based in New York. She graduated with honors in design from LUZ (Universidad del Zulia) in 2019 and has since built a practice centered on editorial design and typography as tools for thinking through identity — including an ongoing research project developing an original typeface, Maracaibo, drawn from her own background.
Jiaoyang Li (moderator) is a poet, cross-media artist, translator, and co-founder of Accent. Born in 1994 in Yibin, Sichuan, and now based in New York, she works across text, performance, and visual art. Her work has been presented at venues including New York Live Arts, Chashama, Mana Contemporary, Today Art Museum, the Immigrant Artist Biennial, Performa Biennial, and poetry festivals in New York, Beijing, Edinburgh, and Greece. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her honors include support from PEN America, NYFA, the British Council, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Bread Loaf, and she was named to AACYF's 2024 "30 Under 30" for Chinese Americans in culture and media.
Letra Muerta Inc. is an award-winning design studio and archive center co-directed by Faride and Oriana, with roots as a Venezuelan publishing house founded in 2014. After a decade of publishing work centered on Venezuelan and Latin American writers — many of them women working outside the mainstream — Letra Muerta opened a physical studio in New York (now in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) in 2022, where it operates as a hybrid space for editorial and exhibition design, historical preservation, workshops, and archive-building, with a particular focus on translation, multilingual publishing, and typography. Its publications are held in the collections of Cornell, Columbia, MoMA, the New York Public Library, RISD, RIT, the University of Toronto, and the National Library of Venezuela.