Curator Spotlight #5: Cao Shu

In this fourth chapter of our Curator Spotlight series, we continue our journey through the evolving landscape of Chinese digital and new media art. This time, we turn our attention to Cao Shu, a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans writing, photography, 3D digital moving image, mixed-media sculpture, and video game-based installations.

Through this conversation, Giuseppe Moscatello and Linda Shen explore the intricately layered universe Cao constructs, a universe where digital aesthetics and mythic structures intersect, and where haunting reflections on history, memory, and speculative futures emerge.

Cao Shu’s recent work explores subjects such as nuclear energy as a ghostly medium, socialist science fiction, swarm intelligence, digital memory and encryption systems, and speculative cosmologies like the Chthulucene. He weaves these themes into projects that blur the boundaries between visual narrative, interactive systems, and philosophical inquiry, often positioning the viewer in a space of uncertainty and curiosity.

His experimental works have been exhibited at world-renowned venues such as Kunsthaus Baselland, Matadero Madrid, M+ Museum Hong Kong, Power Station of Art (Shanghai), UCCA Dune, BY ART MATTERS (Hangzhou), Macao Art Museum, OCAT Shanghai, Sleep Center New York, and White Rabbit Gallery (Sydney). His moving image projects have also earned recognition in major international film festivals, including Leipzig DOK, DMZ Docs, Annecy, Ottawa International Animation Festival, and the Milano and Message to Man International Film Festivals.

Cao’s practice invites us to consider how digital languages, ar from being neutral, encode memory, ideology, and speculation. His visual poetics speak to a deeper truth beneath the surface of algorithmic systems: that technology is not just a tool for representation, but a generative mythological engine capable of summoning ghosts, rewriting futures, and storing the unconscious collective of an era.

In this interview, we explore how Cao approaches narrative structure, historical hauntings, and the role of the artist as both archivist and architect of speculative digital realities.(…)

Giuseppe Moscatello and Linda Shen: In your work you explore hauntology in relation to collectivism and personal family histories. How do you approach the tension between personal memory and collective ideology in your storytelling?  

Cao Shu: In my view, personal memory often appears against the backdrop of collective subconscious. By a very random coincidence, I discovered that 3D rendered digital images have a kind of false realism in their appearance, reminiscent of the architectural renderings we remember or images that carry distinct marks of a specific era. This visual impression is rooted in the collective memory of a whole era, a subconscious level of visual experience. Therefore, personal memory is, to some extent, unreliable or, much like a 3D rendered image, filtered through the subject’s own lens of recollection. For example, in my work “Phantom Sugar” and “Infinity and Infinity Plus One,” the artificial feel of the rendered images connects with the narrator’s dreamlike, fragmented memories. In the work “Contains it like lines of a hand”, collectivism acts as a filter on my mother’s personal memory. In her childhood recollections, the experience of digging air-raid shelters is set against the backdrop of Soviet nuclear deterrence and the public life following the Tangshan earthquake. Yet, in her personal memory, these experiences feel like a fairy tale as she wandered through underground castles at her neighbors’ homes. (…)

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