shuwen cao
Printmaking MA
Royal College of Art
Graduates: 2025
Specialisms: Printmaking
My location: London, United Kingdom
shuwen cao
First Name: shuwen
Last Name: cao
University / College: Royal College of Art
Course / Program: Printmaking MA
Graduates: 2025
Specialisms: Printmaking
My Location: London, United Kingdom
Website: Click To See Website
About
Shuwen Cao is a visual artist working primarily with printmaking, exploring how time, nature, and emotion sediment and transform withinpersonal memory. My creative process often begins with direct experience, using collected natural elements- leaves, water rip-ples, landscapes-as both material and metaphor to give form to invisible traces and internal states.She is particularly drawn to the poetics of decay and transformation. In my work, decay is not an end but a quiet metamorphosis. Irecord this through the tactile language of print: the textures of withering leaves, the distortion of water, the subtle impressionsleft on paper all become archives of moments and feelings that resist easy articulation.My practice also reflects on the blurred boundary between the virtual and the real, especially how individuals project genuineemotions onto virtual figures. This interplay between reality and imagination reveals h o w we construct and understand ourselvesthrough mediated affection.For her, art-making is a slow, sincere confession— a way to preserve fleeting memory, emotional fragments, and unspoken lovethrough ink, water, paper, and time.
Even the Heaviest Love Presses Flat on Paper is a print-based project that weaves together natural decay, emotional memory, and the complexities of virtual affection. Using collected leaves in various stages of withering and combining them with water ripple patterns, I explore the passage of time and the ways in which memory physically imprints itself. At the core of this work is my emotional connection to a virtual character—Vox Akuma. Through layered impressions and textures, I reflect on the weight and presence of a love that exists only in the digital realm. The project title symbolizes how even the deepest emotions are ultimately flattened into physical form through printmaking, raising questions about the legitimacy of feelings formed through screens and intangible bonds. Can love still be real if it’s for someone who doesn’t physically exist? This body of work navigates the intersection between what is real and what is imagined, between nature and simulation, presence and absence—inviting viewers to reflect on their own connections, projections, and emotional truths.