Royal Screw
Solo Exhibition at CAM Museum, Naples
17 – 24 October 2025
The CAM_Casoria Contemporary Art Museum is proud to present Royal Screw, artist Chai Han’s first Italian solo exhibition. In this deeply personal body of work, Chai turns forgotten histories into fragile monuments. Through sculpture, installation and film, she revisits the world of the Shamate (originally from English world ‘smart’), a youth subculture born in China’s rural areas or factory towns, where young migrant workers once used wild hairstyles, digital avatars and emojis, the visual language of an online generation, to carve out visibility within an invisible world.
The exhibition brings together Chai’s works of 2025, including 0.88 Yuan, Jade ID I–IV, The Cheap Thing I & II, Phone Grave and Phone Monument, alongside the documentary film Sha Ma Te, Wo Ai Ni (2019) directed by Yifan Li. Clay cigarettes boxes, fractured jades and engraved relics turn ordinary materials into vessels of memory. Each piece speaks quietly of dignity, loss and the stubborn creativity that survives within systems built to erase.
Chai was born in Jixi, on China’s northern border, and once belonged to the Shamate community herself. Her practice transforms that experience into a form of remembrance, an act of care for those who made themselves visible in a world that refused to look. “This exhibition isn’t about nostalgia,” she says. “It’s an excavation. A monument to a civilisation that was never allowed to exist.”
Reflecting on the dialogue between China and Italy, Chai writes:
“If we look further back in time, both Italy and China were once known as nations of craftsmanship, where art and labour were inseparable. But globalisation split our paths. Italy remained celebrated for its refined handcrafts, while China became the world’s factory. In my work, I use ancient materials like jade, bone and bamboo to carve life back into what machines have consumed. It’s a kind of reversed craftsmanship.”
For Chai, Naples is more than a host city; it is a mirror. She describes it as a place of “vitality and dignity,” where creation persists through change. Royal Screw finds its home here, among the living layers of a city that understands how beauty can rise from what endures.
