Leting Cai

Leting Cai is a multi-media artist whose practice explores the intersection of material, identity, and cultural narrative. Rooted in both Eastern and Western traditions, her work spans from intimate textile pieces to large-scale metal sculptures, bridging craft, material construction, and conceptual inquiry. Trained in painting, welding, woodwork, crocheting, and felting, she integrates these techniques with traditional Chinese forms such as Guohua (ink painting) and Fenshui (blue-and-white porcelain making), building a multilingual visual vocabulary that resists categorical boundaries.

As a Chinese female artist, Cai engages deeply with themes of gender, labour, and value. Her recent works reexamine the historical division between domestic craft and institutionalized art, questioning the gendered hierarchies that have long dismissed feminine modes of making. By tracing parallels between academic visual languages and household creative labor, she investigates how female creative practices have been marginalized and overlooked in both art history and contemporary institutions.

Cai views art not only as a personal and cultural medium, but also as a site for collective conversations. Her installations aim to carve out space—materially and conceptually—for intersectional discourse, inviting audiences to reflect on the entanglements of tradition, identity, and resistance. Through tactile materials and grounded processes, Cai’s work challenges inherited assumptions and invites new ways of perceiving material, gender, and the cultural systems that frame the act of making.

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