Yu Cai, born in 1993 in Zhuzhou City, Hunan Province, China, is a printmaker, illustrator and painter. She studied at the Oil Painting Department of the China Academy of Fine Arts. During her undergraduate studies, she became interested in the ancient and delicate technique of etching, therefore after that, she came to Italy to study etching techniques at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, and graduated in 2018. Currently she works and lives in Venice.  From  2017, she began to participate in various national and international exhibitions and in 2018, she was invited by the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation to Moscow. Her works have been active around the world.

Yu Cai is deeply influenced by Hieronymus Bosch, fascinated by hid witty and facetious stories and she loves ancient oriental myths. Those mysterious lands,strange creatures, especially the Eastern sense of humor. She believes that art could also be humorous and naive, although she does it in a very serious way, which even makes her work misunderstood of placing too much emphasis on details. It takes far more time to think, to conceive the stories and the structures than really realizing it,she said. Indeed, the strongly non-linear narrative movement is an important feature of her works. She really likes to fill them, when you look at them, you would soon fall into a chaotic and disorderd situation, as if being pulled out from this real world but enter her unique, grotesque, cute, magical, even dangerous space as she expected. The coldness of the seemingly figurative works is actually buried with various metaphors. People won`t extract the same things into mind, such as they don`t laugh at the same things. She thinks that each sensitive individual has his “Ideal land” in the deep heart at the end of silence, then wheter the objective world is sustainable at the moment or not, there`s always a place to go, and that`s the spiritual world where she wants to touch through her works.