This Is Me Looking Wen-You Cai
This is Me Looking
by Wen-You Cai
Opening Reception: August 5, 5 - 8 PM
Exhibition Duration: August 5 - August 30, 2026
Accent Sisters
89 5th Ave #702, New York, NY 10002
In 1995, at the age of 5, Wen-You Cai arrived in New York City with her parents from Japan. Her artist father came as a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council and was part of the P.S.1 International Studio program. At the time a fellow resident at P.S.1, Diana López was working on a project called El Ojo de… (The Eye of) asking children from different backgrounds to take photographs to see the world through their perspectives. She invited Wen-You to be a part of this project.
For three months in 1996, Wen-You took photographs of what she saw in her first year in America. She followed her parents to cultural landmarks in New York and D.C., to parades, museums, and galleries; she photographed visitors to their home and her parents at work making art. Each time a roll of film was developed, a selection of photographs was made by Wen-You and Diana, glued into a sketch book, and captioned starting with “This is…” Diana started writing the captions, and later as Wen-You learned her alphabet, she started to caption them herself. This was how she made a journal of her first year in America. Since the completion of the residency, Diana went on to exhibit photographs taken by the children she collaborated with in Venezuela. They never met again.
Wen-You continued taking photographs, much like the style she cultivated at six years old, taking a point-and-shoot camera wherever she went, capturing what was curious to her, from special events to mundane moments in her life. She later produced the photo books Rooster, Tiger, Sheep by Snake (2019), and Minnan Exit (2024), tracing a subject through photos taken over a decade from her archive.
In 2025, Wen-You serendipitously met Faride Mereb and Oriana Nuzzi from Letra Muerta, the design studio that digitized the negatives from Diana López's 1995–96 project and subsequently designed, edited, and published a book on it in 2022. Seeing a follow up in Wen-You’s photography practice, they began discussions to produce a photo book, combining Wen-You’s photographs taken thirty years apart.
For this solo exhibition at Accent Sisters, a collection of 14 photo sets will be exhibited, pairing Wen-You’s photos taken this past year in 2025-26, with images and captions from 1996. Additionally, an image of the title page of the original album she produced in collaboration with Diana will be on display to further contextualize the origin of the project. This is the first project of an ongoing dialogue between the artist and her younger self, looping back to where it began. It is also a demonstration of an impact one artist had through her project in the 90s that sparked a lifelong curiosity for another artist.
Throughout the years Wen-You has felt like a reluctant artist. She had felt like she wasn’t making art, and even wrote a book called When You Make No Art (2015). But this project proves that all along she has been making art, passively producing material, only to surface decades later with a rich archive.
About Wen-You Cai
Wen-You Cai is an artist based in New York. As a Chinese person born in Japan and raised in New York, her cross-cultural identity has infused all areas of her creative endeavors.
She is the founder and director of Special Special, a creative community platform. A book of projects produced from 2016 to 2022, titled A Small Pond Under the Blue Sky, was released in 2023. In 2024, Special Special began publishing an annual magazine, 4N, focusing on creative migration and artist visa challenges.
She is the author of When You Make No Art (2015), which discusses her experiences growing up in museums after hours, and a photography book titled Rooster, Tiger, Sheep by Snake (2019), featuring photographs of her family taken over twelve years, published on the occasion of her solo exhibition of the same title at MGM Cotai, Macau. In 2024, she released a photo book, Minnan Exit, featuring photographs she took of her family funerals in the Minnan tradition.
Her artworks have been exhibited at Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; MGM Cotai, Macau; Alisan Fine Arts, Hong Kong; Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Xiamen; On Sundays at Watarium, Tokyo; Cafe China, NY; and de Gournay NY.
Her work has been featured in publications such as Nowness, Harper's Bazaar Art, and Vogue China, and she has spoken about her projects at institutions such as the Harvard Club of New York, Printed Matter, Museum of Chinese in America, Green-Wood Cemetery, University of Pennsylvania, and NYU. She is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and Goldsmiths College.