Jasper Yi CaoPhotography
 Horizon, I know you are a ship that will never anchor
Loveletters, Fireworks and Time Travle 
A Transoceanic Imagination: Midsummer, 1994
Memory of salt
Pink, Pink
Connected and Estranged Relatives
Physical, intimate
Lyrical Miniature
Between the Wall
Distortion
仙人掌诗人在乱叫 Howling Cactus: Independent Photography & Publishing
01: And then the traces disappeared
02: No words wander here
2/5: Personal Preference
03: Still can't turn to the left
04: Touch us here, in the wrong place
Publication
Lyrical Miniature
Loveletters, Fireworks and Time Travle ( with PNPRESS )
第二支矛 The second spear ( with HAKUCHI )
Untitled, Unsent letter
Curation
Fiction, Vision, MirrorBook  Design
一百年太久 So Long ( for Yao Meng)
缀断耳语 Episodic Murmuring ( with Stasis Space, for Yiwei )
神游 Spirt Away ( with Automatic studio )
使者的云 Obscurities ( for Yao Meng & Vera Xia )
Nonsense ( for Choi Hui )
Game of Photos ( for Cai Dongdong )
Fissure of a Sweet dreame ( for Jialin Yan )
Random Access to Memory ( for Tengteng Da )
最后的人 The last of us ( for RyeWave )
目之所至 As far as we can see 2022 ( for athaartspace )
目之所至 As far as we can see 2023 ( for athaartspace )
青灯 
一种平静 ( for Wang Xin )
Life-Place ( for Yesheng )
Picnic ( for Uqbar )
俎 Zood ( for Tengteng Da )
Decision ( for Bian Yachun )
Journey of Perplexity ( for Lei Bai )
Water, Elsewhere ( for Jianuan Xu )
The Evil Dragon Was Defeated in Winter ( for Shu Zhang )
CV
Jasper Yi Cao (b. 1998, Changsha, China) is a photographic artist and book designer based in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Her work explores the intersection of archives, memory, and collective experience in contemporary Chinese society.

Blending photography, handmade books, and darkroom techniques, she constructs non-linear visual narratives. She is also the founder of a design studio and co-founder of the “Howling Cactus” photography group, through which she has published magazines, exhibited internationally, and supported self-publishing. Her practice spans image-making, editorial design, and independent publishing, with a focus on history, memory, and the poetics of time.

jasper.caoyi@gmail.com
Instagram: cao1caoyi
Publication Untitled, Unsent letter

Netherland
2024 Riso  Print
Photobook
This zine is a result of my daily work at a risograph studio. I pieced together fragmented images and bound them into a book.
Memory itself is unreliable — what people tend to believe is often just the imagined version of memory.
Perhaps that’s why I wanted to use two equally imaginative mediums to construct a new kind of narrative.

I have a preference for film photography, and to me, reading letters feels much like shooting with a film camera.
After taking the photos, I often spend a long time in the darkroom, repeatedly observing the negatives I had shot.
By the time the images are actually developed, ten or fifteen days may have already passed — and seeing them again gives me a strange, dislocated sense of time.
Reading letters feels similar: I drift outside the bounds of real time, searching for a shared emotional language.

In my previous works, I’ve often embraced the unexpected — the accidents or printing errors that appear during development — as a kind of imaginative compensation, something beyond my original intention.


© Jasper Yi Cao