Introduction

Crassula Shang is an artist, archivist, and writer carrying their grandmother's surname, post-socialist spectral traces, and an ambivalent view on feminist techno-fantasy. Their practice centers on the haunted infrastructure of technologies, primarily exploring these concepts through new media, social practice, and science and technology studies (STS), surfacing the materials and histories that powerful sociotechnological imaginaries render invisible or disposable.

Two bodies of work carry this practice forward. Expiring Utopia, Ghostly Signals traces the ghosts of Chinese cyberfeminism across digital and material spheres, asking what feminist knowledge persists in gaps between defunct hyperlinks, censored platforms, and partial archives, and how the material production of technology complicates digital resistance. The Sun That Isn't Yet extends these questions into nuclearity, particularly nuclear fusion in Shang's hometown of Hefei, where the artificial sun is simultaneously mythological and material, its clean energy promise sustained by extraction chains and environmental and military complications.

Shang's practice refuses the dichotomy of speculative and real, digital and material, past and future, working from the understanding that they are always co-constituted. In their work, they often move between empirical evidence and embodied encounter, archival fragments and speculative reconstruction. Trained first as a scientist, they bring fluency in technical ways of knowing to artistic research.

Selected Exhibitions; Gray Area, San Francisco, United States; HackThePromise, Basel, Switzerland; ISEA, Seoul, South Korea; SPAM New Media Festival, Seattle, United States; EASST-4S, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Internet Archive, San Francisco, United States.

Shang's work has also been published in Feminist Media Histories (UC Press).