Photo by Stephen Ironside, Iron Lotus Creative
Recent Reviews/Interviews
Jaiha Lee, “In Conversation with Danqi Cai,” Burnaway, March 26, 2026
Bio
Danqi Cai [dan-CHI Tsai] is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and Assistant Professor of Foundations at the University of Arkansas (UARK) in Fayetteville, AR. A bilingual artist who emigrated from China to the U.S. as a young adult, she uses papermaking, print media, and animation to explore how language shapes cultural inheritance, adaptation, and transformation. She remixes ancient Chinese characters and found instructional imagery to reimagine systems of knowledge transmission.
Danqi earned her MFA in Studio Art (Printmaking) from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and her BFA in Printmaking and Humanistic Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited internationally at International Print Center New York, Art Centre Silkeborg Bad (Denmark), Stove Works, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia, and the Bradbury Art Museum. Her work has been supported by residencies at the Banff Centre (Canada), Hambidge Center, Morgan Conservatory, and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. Her curatorial work has been presented at the Charlotte Street Foundation. Critical writing on her work has appeared in Burnaway and Sixty Inches From Center. She is a recipient of the 2024 Practicing Artist Grant through Mid-America Arts Alliance’s Artists 360 program.
Artist Statement
I emigrated from China to the U.S. at 18, and I make work about how language carries the values we inherit.
I make paper by hand. I cut mylar stencils to layer pulp paints and form shapes with wet pulp. I also collage found instructional imagery, sometimes catching it between a blown-out shape and the sheet beneath, hidden until light comes through.
My subject is written Chinese, mostly seal script—an ancient form where characters still look like the things they name. A character is built from smaller parts, each with its own meaning. The word for "good" is a woman beside a child. Change one component and "to raise" becomes "to discard." I make these words as paper objects and let them shift, so a meaning I was taught as fixed turns out to be a decision someone made.
But the stencils drift. What starts as a character becomes a shape that isn’t one—a form with no meaning to inherit.
Lately I've followed that drift. The recent work is nearly wordless: color, mark, weight. Making paper is what steadies me, and I've come to think that abstraction is safer than words. I'm finding out what's left when the language goes.
If you’d like to get in touch, please email me at danqistudios (at) gmail (dot) com or fill out the contact form below