Fairs
Paris Internationale
2025
Shuyi Cao
Ines Katamso
Fu Nagasawa
Booth -1.4
Dates_ October 21–26, 2025
Venue_ Rond-point des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris
2025
Shuyi Cao
Ines Katamso
Fu Nagasawa
Booth -1.4
Dates_ October 21–26, 2025
Venue_ Rond-point des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris
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Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present Future Fossils at Paris Internationale 2025, featuring works by Shuyi Cao, Ines Katamso, and Fu Nagasawa. Bringing together practices that intertwine material transformation, myth-making, and inherited craft, this presentation traces the tension between permanence and change, what endures and what slips away. Upon the white sand, fossils are not only remnants of the past but anticipations of what may one day persist, gestures of care, the slow accumulation of memory, and the palpable gravity of making. The booth takes form as an edifice of riddles, where natural and synthetic sediments quietly intersect, skimming across thresholds of visibility and time.
Shuyi Cao’s sculptural compositions reflect on the transformation of materials through personal, ecological, and social entanglements. The Chinese artist’s family and friends offer her gifted remnants of oyster and clam shells, which she embeds with resin, glass, seeds and steel onto driftwood. In Dew Nester (2025), these records of intimacy and consumption settle into a grounded form, resembling a slow-growing fossil or botanical structure. Hanging in space, Xenophora IV (2024) gathers slender fragments into a suspended shape, its tendrils shimmering above the viewer like sea grass adrift in water. Cao, who has long been based in New York, also collects discarded plastic along the shoreline, where land and sea collapse into a blurred margin. Through what she describes as a metabolic process—melting, grafting, scanning, painting—she turns these materials into fragile constellations that linger between the organic and the technological. For Cao, this myth-making becomes a method of re-storying, an alchemical way of navigating damaged landscapes, recovering belonging, and conjuring wonder from the tidal uncertainties of the present. Earth becomes both medium and witness in Ines Katamso’s compositions. Across stretched cotton, textured soil gathers into flowing lines and shadowed ridges. In her Naga (2025) and Biolateral series (2025), the French–Indonesian artist traces dragon-like silhouettes that emerge and recede, echoing mythical forms in Javanese cosmologies. These mineral traces draw from inherited methods of sensing the land, shaped by vernacular knowledge from the artist’s surroundings in Bali. Accents of bamboo or brass punctuate her paintings’ surfaces, grounding them in their material origins. Beginning with foraging, her process unfolds slowly into a mineral language of erosion and imprinting. Katamso reimagines the terrain as narrator. She weaves together ecological attention and animist belief, creating an active field of relations that speaks and remembers. Kyoto-based artist Fu Nagasawa revisits ornamental traditions from East Asian folk art to develop a pictorial language attuned to rhythm and variation. Influenced by decorative patterns found on ceramics and utilitarian objects from five centuries ago in Japan and the Korean peninsula, his paintings reimagine these inherited motifs through a vocabulary of brushwork and gestures. Areas of translucent pigment drift across the canvas, where warm umbers meet coral tones and mineral greens, forming surfaces that recall hand-glazed finishes, subtly uneven, as if altered mid-process in the heat of a kiln. Part of this sensitivity stems from the artist’s family history in shipbuilding, anchoring his attention to how forms evolve under time and touch. The new paintings fold the past into the present, reapplying historical vestiges onto freshly painted grounds, as if fossilized emblems were gently reawakened within a contemporary skin. |
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