Cai Yaling is an artist born in the 1980s and the mother of two. For eleven years the thread running through her work has been the voice of women — drawn from her own experience as an ordinary woman, unfiltered — and it has produced a body of work centered on the most private, the most painful passages of a woman's life. The work comes almost by instinct. She has burned 408 sticks of incense to render the physical pain of childbirth. She has used molten wax and blinking bulbs to stage the contradictions hidden inside intimacy. She has strung a million beads into the profanities that contemporary women keep buried in their hearts. And with her mother, she has sewn each other's hair into cloth — a record of life, and of a mother's tenderness.
A photograph shows the artist at work, and beside it, her 2022 piece "Goddess." Cai has already won the Lalique Young Artist Award, the Yishu 8 China Young Artist Award, and been named Rising Artist of the Year at the SAP Art Award. This past April, "Goddess" carried her onto the shortlist for the 2022 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. We spoke with her not long ago about the force of femininity running through her work — at a moment when the "Nth Room" scandal and the Tangshan assault case had pushed the question of how women speak up in the face of vulnerability and pain to the front of public attention.
The answer, perhaps, is somewhere in her work. It doesn't take long looking at a piece by Cai Yaling to feel the strong current of femininity in it, a theme that runs through everything she makes. She describes this as natural, even inevitable. In "Goddess," her newest piece, she models the female body using a technique borrowed from Shanxi's traditional flour-dough pastry-making. The sculptures — made of edible dough — render different parts of a woman's body.
"The hands, feet, and torsos are drawn from Bai Mei Ying, the first photographic collection of the Chinese female nude, which shows the shy, traditional body language and physical characteristics of Asian women," she explained to us. After steaming or baking at high heat, the body sculptures swell and char however they please, taking on a strange beauty that looks like the aftermath of suffering. Almost no one had tried this form of art-making before her. The idea traces back to Cai's childhood memories: in her hometown, whenever a holiday or a wedding or a funeral came around, the deft-handed women of the family would shape dough into animals and flowers, each one a kind of blessing.
A childhood photograph of Cai. When she was seven or eight, her grandmother taught her to use scissors, a comb, or chopsticks to pull and snip a soft white lump of dough into a rabbit's ears, a row of petals, a tiny hand. Dough sculpture, now recognized as intangible cultural heritage, had always been done by the women in her family. She has come to believe that when traditional women make these figures, they are not imitating — they are creating. Flour, an unruly material, gave Cai her biggest problem: she could never predict the final result. But seen another way, that unpredictability is its own kind of surprise.
"I put one of the pieces in the microwave, and it started to smoke — the figure's neck and ankles turned black, charred, and suddenly the whole piece had life in it. As the dough sculptures dry out, they lose moisture, and the surface starts to crack and wrinkle. The female form stops looking full, and somehow those wrinkles make the women more real — they give the piece time." The "bodies," left open to whatever gaze happens to fall on them, are eaten away, day by day, by ordinary life. A swollen body, a broken wound, mottled wrinkles: this is what makes up a real woman.
The traces on this fragile material's surface, and the way it's exhibited, gesture toward real social problems as well. A photo from Cai's 2021 solo exhibition. Cai says it was in the process of growing from an unworldly girl from Shanxi into an artist, a wife, and a mother that she came to understand, slowly, what it means to be a "woman" in contemporary society — the roles, the pressures, the constraints that come with it. Her work has tracked her understanding and her reckoning at each stage of life, and accordingly it has moved from something tactful and restrained at first toward something increasingly direct and bold.
A childhood photo of Cai. She was born in 1984 in a place called Yuci, in Jinzhong, Shanxi province, and spent her childhood and adolescence there. Women in Shanxi carry, in their bones, the traits of a very traditional kind of Chinese womanhood — putting family first, enduring hardship without complaint, never voicing a grievance. As a child, that was the entirety of what Cai understood about being a woman. She had no sense of gender at all back then; she simply believed she could do whatever she wanted.
It was only as she grew up, found love, built a life of her own, that she gradually came to understand the weight of the multiple roles a woman carries — daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, mother — and what each of them demands. That's when she discovered that the traditional feminine virtues she had once taken for granted could, at times, turn into a kind of cage. She often found herself wondering: was she supposed to shoulder everything alone, the way her mother's generation had, burying every confusion, every sorrow, every private thought?
"Foreign Object," 2011. "Forest," 2011. When she first began exploring subject matter tied to women, she gravitated toward materials common to daily life, looking for some quality in them that was unusual, or that belonged uniquely to her. "Foreign Object" uses ordinary toilet paper — wet it, and it swells into a lump. At the time, the artist had a nodule on her thyroid, and she gave that physical affliction a concrete form in the piece.
"Forest" uses the fuzzy tips of early-spring willow branches, standing up like human hair, which she arranged into the shape of a woman's most private anatomy. Cai told us that as a child, her parents were too busy with work to look after her, so they asked a neighbor — an art teacher at Shanxi University — to watch her, and after school she would follow him and learn to paint. That was how Cai found her way into art, and in 2002 she was admitted to the sculpture department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Leaving Shanxi for Beijing was, for her, a critical turning point — both the school's teaching and the environment of the city gave her an entirely new way of seeing.
Cai Yaling pushing open the "Gate of Tradition," one of her works. In 2011, Cai finished her graduate studies. Her thesis work won a string of awards at the time and appeared in numerous exhibitions; by all rights, what should have followed was the golden stretch of an artist's early career. Instead, she got married the moment she graduated. The following year, she had her first child. She gave up everything willingly, devoting herself entirely to caring for that child. "August 21, 2012," 2012. In the process of caring for her first baby, she began, almost by instinct, to make work again.
Women in Shanxi cut off their hair before they give birth. Cai took that severed hair and used it as if it were pencil lines in a drawing, stitching it strand by strand onto a piece of white cotton cloth. The hair, coiled round and round, formed rings that sank gradually inward, standing for a woman's belly, for childbearing. She kept at it, she says, for half an hour a day, for two or three years running. Whatever she was feeling on a given day — calm, or anxious — showed up in the lines: straight or curved, sparse or dense.
When Cai first began "sewing hair," she never imagined it would become a finished piece. She simply needed, urgently, to sew — the act itself worked like a kind of spiritual practice, something that calmed her, that let her face herself and express what she was carrying. She named the piece after the date her first child was born. It opened a new chapter in her practice: making work out of the material of her own body, work bound tightly to the facts of her own life.
"It wasn't until after I gave birth that I understood what a mother goes through to bring a child into the world. Not just the birth itself — the hormonal changes after, years without a full night's sleep, the body changing shape, postpartum depression..." These are symptoms every woman who becomes a mother lives through, and rarely wants to speak of. Giving birth, in body and in spirit alike, is something like being reborn — it remakes a woman completely.
Cai and her mother. Having lived through all of this herself, the artist found that her feelings toward her own mother had shifted — the bond had tightened, the understanding deepened. She invited her mother to make work with her: she took the white hairs her mother had plucked out and pressed inside a book, and sewed them, alongside her own black hair, into a single piece. "Me in 1987" and "Mother in 1987," 2016. In her memory, her mother once had a particularly beautiful polka-dot dress.
She borrowed the polka-dot motif, and had her mother sew her black hair while she sewed her mother's white hair. To Cai, that white hair stood for her mother's vanished youth, for all the years of effort she had poured into life. The series was shown in many exhibitions, and later, many collectors wanted to acquire these works so full of maternal tenderness — Cai turned down every one of them. She felt this belonged only to her and her mother, a private exchange, a private memory.
What she hopes the series tells its audience is this: everyone can find some way of their own to record the bond between themselves and their mother. In 2015, three years after her first child was born, Cai became pregnant with her second. The contractions, this time, were severe, and her doctor told her, "There's nothing to be done — you have to go through it, you just have to bear it." After the second birth, her depression came back worse than the first time. On one side was the pain of delivery; on the other, caring for two children at once, and a pressure heavier than anything she'd known.
On top of that, she found she had gone silent within the art world — no one asked her to exhibit, no one seemed to care what she'd been doing in those two years. Everything she had worked for before — getting into a good university, the prizes, the shows — seemed to have simply vanished. Cai Yaling burned 408 sticks of incense onto white cotton cloth, marking the hours of contractions she endured with her second child. At home, everything had reset to zero; she felt her social standing, her sense of her own worth, had been wiped clean, and all that remained was a single category: female.
Give birth, produce milk, rock the baby to sleep — like a machine.
"Where am I? Who will hear my voice? What do I want to do with my future? Late at night, after everyone else was asleep, the thing I said to myself, over and over, was: You have to believe in yourself. You cannot stop chasing what you want."
"Secret," 2016. It was in this stretch of time, with no say in anything, that Cai began working with the simplest nouns, single sentences, trying to voice the urgent thing she wanted to say to the world. The words carry no fixed context — anyone can bring their own reading to them. "Mom, I Don't Like You Anymore," 2015. The first piece in this series came out of an offhand joke her daughter made. The moment her daughter said those words, Cai felt as though the warmth and passion inside her had been drained out.
Language can work like a weapon; this one lodged in her heart. She carved the sentence into jujube wood and burned it to a charred black, giving external form to the despair she felt at the time. "Baby," 2016. In this piece, the artist let candle wax drip onto the scorched wood, dissolving the sweetness built into the word "baby" and exposing the more complicated feelings hidden underneath it — demand, need, moral coercion. In the same way, "mother" is a word that carries such weight, and yet behind it lies a woman's unconditional giving; the artist uses a lightbulb to stage that contradiction — lit, it glows with something sacred and warm; switched off, it looks like nothing more than a cold, mass-produced object.
"Mother," 2016. When a woman who has just given birth wants to return to work, to pick her career back up, she's expected to throw herself into the job, pushing through every obstacle, as though she had no children at all — and then, at home, she's expected to devote herself entirely to raising them, as though she'd never had a job to begin with.
"Society might call this equality between the sexes, and plenty of women accept it without a second thought, but I don't think it's normal at all," Cai says. "Waiting," 2016. Where does this attitude toward women come from? Leafing idly through a dictionary one day, the artist noticed that nearly every example sentence containing the word "she" described weakness, a need for help, emotional excess.
"She wept in her grief." "Her beauty put her in danger." "She was forced to give up the idea." Cai cut these sentences out and pasted them onto a small stool wrapped in wet toilet paper. The words, fused with the crumpled, sodden paper, come to resemble something inside her — an emotion, full of sorrow, straining to say something.
"Bitches," 2020. Bitches, Leave Me Alone, No — these are the profanities, the refusals, that ordinary women, including friends of the artist, let slip without thinking. They are, in truth, the real reaction many women carry inside them today.
She rendered them in strung beads, a kind of gift to women everywhere. She believes this sort of release is worth commemorating. "Red Sea," 2021. "No," 2018. Another of Cai's series is made entirely of hand-strung beaded curtains. To her, the beaded curtain resembles the emotional pattern of contemporary life: under the pace and pressure of modern work, we've grown used to suppressing and controlling what we feel. But those feelings never really leave — they stay buried, and the moment something touches them, they come pouring out.
"No" was a response to a string of sexual assault cases against women that had occurred in China at the time. On the surface it looks unshakably resolute, but the moment it's touched, the giant word NO begins to sway, and the letters blur. It reflects something real that women face today: we want to state our position with certainty, and yet, so often, it turns into compromise. It was with the beaded-curtain series that the artist began paying closer attention to the pressures and confusions carried by more women around her, and she started hoping her work could help other women speak, directly and without hesitation.
"Red Sea," 2021. "Red Sea" is a massive installation piece; while making it, Cai brought in a number of women workers from Hainan to string beads alongside her. Talking with them, she found that although these women faced real hardships in their lives, they were always laughing, throwing themselves into the work of making life better with everything they had. The site where Cai and the workers strung the beads for "Red Sea." That optimism, that grit, gave Cai a real lift — behind lives that might look, on the surface, unremarkable, there was an enormous reserve of women's strength and feeling.
"Each of us is a single wave in the flood of this era — there's something we all share." "Am I a Good Person?" 2020. Cai says that over the course of making work centered on women, she's faced her share of doubt, but she believes recording these emotions matters, in contemporary life, more than almost anything. If no one speaks them, these voices simply disappear.
"I want to be the kind of person who records this — who gets people thinking, who gives more people the courage to speak." Editor: Huang Xirui. Editing: Deng Kaili. Click below to download the Yitiao Art App.