Q&A: River Yuhao Cao, New Contemporaries 2025/2026 artist

We sat down with artist River to talk about the influences behind their moving-image practice, their latest film exploring folklore and ghost stories, the challenges of their creative process, recent exhibitions they’ve loved, and advice for emerging artists.

My grandparents worked in a folkloric play, my mother is a music teacher, and my father is an oil painter. I have been deeply influenced by them and their stories.

I have loved to mess things up since I was a child. Later, when I started watching music videos from the 1990s and early 2000s during my high school, they were also messy to me, and I became increasingly interested in media, including sound and video. As a result, I began recording videos with my mother's old DVD camera. That may have been the beginning of my artistic practice, and it remains the original motivation behind my current moving-image work.

I am currently developing a new film, Whose Monument? (working title). It is an experimental ghost film that explores folk stories, historical archives, and collective trauma in the Yangtze River basin of southern China. I am particularly inspired by the ways in which communities living along the waterways confront major historical events, transforming disaster, death, and grief into local performative forms such as mobile funeral stages, grassroots bands, and lamentation rituals. In this background, these mobile stages, musicians, and repeatedly retold folk tragedies generate a ghostly resonance that echoes across generations.

I am currently in the research and development phase, working with different materials with different texture, exploring archives, and collecting local ghost stories.

Spiritually: I’m actually very easily frightened by these ghost stories, so I need strong emotional and mental support while working on these materials, especially during the research – those ghost stories from real people.

Physically: Back pain, and the demands of writing funding applications.

1. Fondazione In Between Art Film: CANICULA
2. Cabinet Gallery: Caspar Heinemann
3. Chisenhale Gallery: Arash Nassiri, A Bug’s Life

1. Always keep an inspirational notebook with you maybe. Inspiration comes and goes, and those moments are precious. Sometimes I even wake up in the middle of the night to write down my dreams. The notes can be very messy, but they often contain valuable ideas.
   
2. Try to share your work with people from different backgrounds, not only artists and art professionals. You may find the conversations surprisingly insightful and inspiring.
   
3. Love yourself more. Being kind to yourself is more important than being ambitious.