About PM/AM
PM/AM is a contemporary art gallery located on the border of Soho and Fitzorovia in the heart of London. It hosts a busy programme of shows across the two exhibition floors of the Eastcastle Street space. The gallery’s lower ground floor studio provides the location for a residency space for international and under-represented artists to develop their practice. Together the spaces form a unique cultural and creative hub in the bustling centre of the city.
PM/AM’s mission is to reflect through art how we engage with ourselves and the world today, expressed through the artists it is fortunate enough to work with. Recent graduates, those emerging into the spotlight and in their mid-careers on the international stage all feature across a dynamic programme. The gallery works on the vanguard of the emerging art sector, responsible for finding artists of tomorrow, and is keen to explore and present work originating from the many interlocking diasporas of the world. PM/AM’s plays a part in the incubation of contemporary art’s future by representing a carefully selected roster of artists, working with them to initiate and grow lasting careers in the global art world.
As a dynamic arts organisation PM/AM’s activities extend beyond exhibitions into consultation, publications and editorial, providing the means to facilitate placements with collectors and institutions, and create extended content to further support and expose the artists we work with. This self-contained structure is key to the gallery’s broad outlook and capabilities, however we value collaborations with external writers, curators and other galleries to realise our goals.
Exhibition Text
“Art is the comprehension of the world by other, non-rational ways. Art is what in other areas we call revelation. Works of art are doors cracked opened to eternity.”—Valery Bryusov, Keys to the Mysteries.
Mary Shangyu Cai’s landscapes flourish with feral delight. By inviting the viewer to decrypt the figures hidden within, Cai strips back our urban-centric every day so that the synergy between the natural and human world may be felt once more. Her use of concealed hues –capturing the colours reflected when light touches her subjects– enhances the otherworldly atmosphere, elevating reality to a psychedelic plane. Cai credits this exploration of light and colour to the work of Turner’s watercolours and Impressionist landscapes. These works hold a similar fragility, a sense that they might dissolve before you, like a dream changing scene. Indeed, the more you look, the more the figures hidden amongst her botanical subjects begin to ripple to each painting’s surface. Cai’s technique of layering creates a shimmering haze, almost hallucinatory. She builds the bodies layer by layer, planting lines that grow alongside the trees and flowers.
Literature and mythology serve as equally defining inspirations. From the ancient tree spirits of Chinese folklore to the dryads of Greek mythology, Cai’s preoccupation with the spiritual personification of nature is well precedented. The anthropomorphised landscapes she resurrects are testaments to the strength –and stubbornness– of human nature. They also attest to the endurance of our collective storytelling and unconscious. In addition to mythology, Cai’s artwork is at home amongst the Symbolist canon, her work illustrating the shift from the physical to metaphysical that so inspired the poets. In his poem ‘The Windows’, Mallarmé professes that ‘I feel that I am dying, and, through the medium / Of art or of mystical experience, I want to be reborn, / Wearing my dream like a diadem, in some better land / Where beauty flourishes’. Cai depicts just such a mystical land, where, through living in harmony, the human essence is not only permitted rebirth but granted eternal life. Harmony therefore becomes synonymous with beauty in her works, not only flourishing, but reigning sovereign.
The exhibition reflects stories from Cai’s own life, where moments of darkness are transformed into testaments of resilience, growth, and the enduring human spirit. “Water only flows forward,” Cai explains. While Cai’s subject-matter presents windows into a mythical realm, the sense of hope she sparks is material, ignited by the vitality of her colour palette. The aftertaste of this hope is not one born of dream or fancy. It is firm and tangible, with roots in the ground that span generations of faith in our immortal place within the ecosystem. Cai’s unification of nature with humanity feels both aspirational and truthful. Her work is an ode to pastoralism, leaving her viewers yearning for an Edenic time, nostalgic for something we remember only from our fantasies of the past. Cai’s work triggers the understanding that, with the rise of the urban world taking the place of the natural, it may only be through death that human bodies will physically live in reciprocity with the earth once more. It equally lends hope, however, that the human essence transcends any such corporeal end. In more ways than one, Cai’s work depicts a form of heaven; an ideal, an ultimate destination, an eternal ascension.
Chloé Beroud
January, 2024
CV
Born: 1999, Beijing, China.
Lives and works in London.
Education
2023 - MA Painting, Royal College of Art.Royal College of Art, London.
2022 - Maryland Institute Collage of Art.
Solo Exhibitions
2025 - 60. PM/AM, London (online).
Group Exhibitions
2024 - Passages. Luce Gallery, Turin.
2024 - Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Tube Bulture Hall, Milan.
2023 - YA. 3812 Gallery, London.
2023 - Abstraction. Conart activity, London.
2023 - Linger In Silence. Willesden Gallery, London.
Residencies/Awards
2024 - Artist in Residence at PM/AM, London.
2022 - Creative Vision Award, Maryland Institute Collage of Art.
2021 - Merit Achievement Award, Maryland Institute Collage of Art.
