When Wen-You Looks at Six-Year-Old Wen-You

By SHERLY FAN August 18, 2026

If you were asked to create your own photo album when you were a kid, how would you see it 30 years later? In her new solo show This is Me Looking at Accent Sisters, Wen-You Cai looks back at a photography journal project she collaborated on with Diana López after moving to the United States when she was six years old.

“This is Me Looking”, installation view at Accent Sisters, 2026. Image by Wen-You Cai

After moving to New York City with her artist father, a grantee in the Asian Cultural Council's P.S.1 International Studio Program, Wen-You was invited by fellow resident Diana López to participate in El Ojo de… (The Eye of), which invited children to photograph the world from their own perspectives. With a point-and-shoot camera, Wen-You spent three months photographing her life around New York and D.C. The selected photographs were later glued into a sketchbook and captioned beginning with “This is…” Diana helped her write at first, and Wen-You began captioning them herself after learning the alphabet.

Thirty years later, these pages became the starting point for This is Me Looking at Accent Sisters. Wen-You presents 14 sets of photographs, pairing scanned pages from the original journal—with black-and-white photos and handwritten captions from 1996—with recent color works made between 2025 and 2026. The crooked handwritten text and black-and-white images almost feel as if Wen-You is asking us to set adrift on memory bliss with her. Yet rather than feeling melancholy or blue about time passing and aging, Wen-You presents an enthusiastic, almost innocent curiosity toward it.

Compared to now, when kids grow up with cameras constantly in their hands, Wen-You made these photographs in 1995, a time when camera phones were not even born. Looking at them now invites us to rethink not only how we document the world, but how we look at it—whether we can still meet everyday moments with the same childlike curiosity and wonder Wen-You had at six.

The passing of time becomes especially visible when we start looking at the little details. The Twin Towers stand strong in the background of her 1996 selfie, This is Me.. In 2026, Wen-You pairs it with a selfie she took 30 years later in Tibet and a photograph she took in Paris of a September 11 photography exhibition, creating an unexpected connection back to the photograph that perhaps marked the beginning of her journey with art and photography.

This is Me. New York 1996, Tibet 2025, Paris 2025, 2026, Inkjet Print. Image by Wen-You Cai

Maybe before she ever put on the extraordinary “artist” cap—and as Wen-You herself often resists referring to herself as an artist—she was already showing us how someone full of curiosity and genuineness sees the world. Her artistic eye seems to begin not with trying to make something extraordinary, but simply with looking.

The project itself has also moved across time through synchronicities. In 2025, Wen-You “serendipitously” rediscovered the digitized negatives through Letra Muerta, leading her back to the childhood journal. In a way, the story behind the exhibition behaves like the photographs themselves: people, images, objects, and memories once separated suddenly find each other again decades later.

Looking at the exhibition, I almost felt that I needed a magnifying glass to trace the hidden gems within the works. We are invited not only to see the past and present, but also to go on a treasure hunt for Easter eggs hidden across time.

In several works, Wen-You intentionally aligns objects or subjects from the original photograph with those in the new image. In This is a Watch, is Working., she pairs two clocks so that they visually align. In This is Daddy., her father appears along the same line in two photographs taken decades apart—one in front of the New York City skyline and another of him working in a garden.

This is Daddy. New York 1996, Giverny 2026, 2026 Inkjet Print. Image by Wen-You Cai

There is also a quiet sense of humor in this curious way of looking. Things that might otherwise have nothing to do with one another suddenly seem perfectly connected through Wen-You’s eyes. In bird ISOn the man’s hand., the original photograph shows a bird resting on Lincoln’s hand at the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. Thirty years later, she pairs it with a recent photo of a bird-like poster on a building tower that almost looks like a hand. In the handwritten caption, “ISOn” becomes one word, showing the way a child writes when they are first learning the alphabet. I love that Wen-You kept this detail exactly as she originally wrote it instead of correcting it as an adult, allowing her childhood self to remain exactly as she was while learning how to write and name the world around her.

bird ISOn the man ’s hand. Washington D.C. 1996, Deauville 2025, 2026, Inkjet Print. Image by Wen-You Cai

These discoveries feel like little coincidences waiting to be found across 30 years. Looking at the show, I started to wonder how many of the recent photos were taken after Wen-You began revisiting the project. Did she intentionally take some after looking at the old ones? Or did she simply look through the photography archive she already had and use her imagination to find connections between them?

Regardless of the answer, the question itself becomes part of the scavenger hunt she invites us to join. We start looking for the little connections with her, wondering what is intentional, what is coincidence, and what is simply found through her curious way of looking at the world.

Across these pairings, time does not necessarily move in a straight line. Instead, it seems to rhyme. One object finds another; one place finds another; one version of a person encounters another version of themselves. The longer you look, the more tiny alignments begin to reveal themselves.

Wen-You’s show is ultimately a wonderful examination of being alive and what time really means. It is a pair of curious eyes finding rhythms and tiny alignments in daily life, moving forward while continuously staying a child. Perhaps childhood never completely ends, and the inner child is always there if we are willing to listen—and to look back at them with a loving gaze.

“This is Me Looking”, installation view, 2026. Image by Wen-You Cai

Accent Sisters, 89 5th Ave #702, New York, NY 10002

Opening August 5, 2026 5-8pm

Exhibition Duration: August 6–30, 2026