JTF (just the facts:) Published in 2024 by te editions (here). Softcover book with exposed spine, with illustrated dust jacket, 27.6 x 21.3 cm, 192 pages, with 268 color photographs. Includes an essay by the artist, and interviews with Chen Huaxian, Master Puyuan, and You Gongchu (A-Bue). Texts in English and simplified Chinese. Design by Related Department. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: Wen-You Cai (b. 1989) is a self described “reluctant artist” based in New York City. Her roots are multifarious, as are her creative disciplines. She was born and raised in Japan, her family heritage is Chinese, and her father is the renowned artist Cai Guo-Qiang. In recent years she has published a memoir about growing up in the art world (When You Make No Art, 2015), earned a degree from RISD, founded the New York gallery shop Special Special, launched the international magazine 4N, and established side hustles as a Notary Public and certified Beauty Chiropractor. Throughout all these endeavors, she has documented her life through photographs and videos.
Oh yes, there one more thing. “As early as I can remember,” Cai writes, “I have been afraid of death.” This is the opening sentence of her latest project, the monograph Minnan Exit. “One day in preschool in Japan,” she continues, “I looked into the expansive distance and imagined myself in a coffin. I feared that if I died, I would forever be stuck in a coffin and be buried unground, or cremated, and I would be conscious of my fate.”
Yikes! Such dark thoughts are hardly the crayons-and-juice-cup concerns of a typical toddler, especially when bound in an essay with the adult title “Trying To Accept My Mortality”. But they establish a funereal foundation for Minnan Exit nonetheless. Combining photographs, memories, and interviews, this encyclopedic tome explores aging, loss, and memorial rituals with rapt fascination. Its death plunge is so exhaustive it might be subtitled “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Minnan Funerals But Were Afraid To Ask.”
Ask away. Cai has made herself an expert on family funeral customs. The learning curve has been steep. In fact her first close encounter with death did not occur until 2012, when she attended the funeral of her uncle’s mother in Japan. As it happened, she had just purchased a new camera a few days before the trip. “Being on the periphery of the family of the departed,” she remembers, “I took it upon myself to be a moral support and a photographer.”
The 2012 service was the first of a mortal flurry. Between 2015 and 2021, Cai attended four subsequent funerals, for both sets of maternal and paternal grandparents. All took place in their home city, Quanzhou, Fujian. This is in southeastern China in the Minnan region (close to Dongshan Island, the location of Zhu Lanqing’s family photobook A Journey In Reverse Direction reviewed here). Cai observed and photographed each ceremony with wide-eyed diligence, and the resulting pictures comprise the bulk of Minnan Exit. Its many ceremonies, faces, and relationships form a visual deluge. To help the reader track dates, names, and events, the inside cover of the dust jacket shows a helpful schematic of Cai’s family tree.
When she arrived at the first of these Chinese funerals, her great grandmother’s death in 2015, Cai had “no knowledge of what a Minnan funeral would be like.” Ignorance was bliss in this case, as her inexperience and outsider status allowed a degree of innocent voyeurism unshackled from cultural expectations. “I knew it was rather unusual to photograph funerals and the dead,” she writes, “and some people may even find taking pictures in such situations to be disrespectful or to bring bad luck.”
Nevertheless she persisted, driven largely by curiosity. The photographs in Minnan Exit have a mood of excited discovery. This is especially true in the opening sections which document her gradual entry to Minnan by plane and urban transport. Cai’s memoirist impressions here are direct and casual, pulling the reader deep into China before they quite know what’s happening. She inhales swaths of vernacular scenery with her camera. Soon enough she is making selfies by her grandmother’s bedside. We see domestic interiors, brilliant costumes, and shiny decorations. A photo of her late grandmother mounted in a picture frame brings a measure of closure.
The trigger happy style continues throughout. Cai documents various processions, ornamental shrines, floral arrangements, ceremonial pyres, and memorial feasts with steadfast attention. Photographically, Minnan Exit is not a book of formal studies. Instead these are quick snaps caught in passing, with the crude flash and blunt lighting typical of point-and-shoot prosumer cameras. They might compare broadly to the scrapbook mementos found in any travelogue or family album. The layout complements the material with dense simplicity. Pictures are laid out full bleed, arranged matter-of-fact in singles or tight grids. If they suffer occasional light leaks and misexposures—as in an early roll described in an entertaining anecdote—chalk it up to the serendipitous kismet of photographic fate. “Chinese people say that within 49 days of passing, the recently departed can somehow manifest themselves in the realm of the living, to leave on final remark to their loved ones. I wondered if perhaps the result of those photos were such for me.”
The specificity of this folk wisdom—49 days of caution exactly, and not a day more—is characteristic. This is merely one detail in a head-spinning stew of Buddhist funeral customs and “invisible rules”. Some others: the dead are dressed in 4 pairs of pants and 7 layers of tops to total 11 outer garments. Funerals must be planned on auspicious days, to ensure the date does not conflict with any relative’s Bazi chart. Funeral procession routes must be checked in advance with local elders, lest they cross into the wrong village or neighborhood. Funeral water must be purchased from a designated site and follow a specific route to the ceremony. At the end of a Minnan funeral, it is inauspicious to say “goodbye” to the living. In Western cultures, such a departure is sometimes called an Irish Exit. Performed in Minnan, the function forms the title phrase for Cai’s book.
Exact funeral parameters vary on a case by case basis depending on region, devotion, age of the deceased, urban or rural setting, and local custom. Remembering and harnessing all of these details into a respectful memorial is a full-time challenge for professionals, as Cai reveals in her interview with her family’s funeral “one-stop” director A-Bue (You Gonchu). An interview with Master Puyuan from She-Ting Temple (a monk who helped with the ceremony at her grandmother’s funeral) adds richer layers of information, with additional details and anecdotes. Finally, local expert Chen Huaxian weighs in on death rituals specific to Minnan.
Each of these exchanges takes up a lengthy multi-page text passage. Including Cai’s introduction, there are four in total, interspersed roughly equally as colored supplements in the main photographic body. Even though the information is presented in written form, and easily reviewable, it is voluminous and somewhat overwhelming, It must be quite a chore to internalize and follow all the rules from memory, and even harder to do such a thing while grieving. And to do all of the above while also photographing non-stop? That’s a noteworthy achievement.
Minnan Exit is not exactly a memoir. But it has a subtext of personal growth, with more narrative arc than most photography monographs. We watch over her shoulder as Cai attends one funeral after another, sucking up bits of heritage, custom, and knowledge in the process. One gift of photography is that it can do this quickly and easily, in great clumps. In Cai’s hands, the camera operates like a vacuum cleaner of data. Back home, the info dust bin can be emptied and sorted.
As presented in book form, all of this newly acquired material is still somewhat raw and undigested. It has not developed into wisdom yet, but the reader can sense that possibility in the future. If and when the next family funeral comes, Cai will be better prepared than ever. Perhaps these are merely baby steps for the ultimate rite of passage, the one life event which cannot be documented? “This book may become my memento mori,” she writes. A strong possibility, but who knows. Unlike ritual funeral rites, her future is yet unscripted.
Collector’s POV: Wen-You Cai does not appear to have consistent gallery representation at this time. As a result, interested collectors should likely connect directly with the photographer via her website (linked in the sidebar).
