Plant Residency™️ is a residency program for Artists and Houseplants

Special Special has been hosting Plant Residency™️ since 2020 around the globe, along with its sister project Plant Adoption Bureau™️

Let's reignite this project with your support! If you or someone you know has a public-facing space with ample natural light, let's discuss! 

Contact: info[at]specialspecial.com

Wen-You Cai, founder and director of Special Special, opened her first solo photography exhibition along with a Special Special pop-up at MGM Macau Resort. The exhibition was accompanied by the release of her photo book "Rooster, Tiger, Sheep by Snake." The exhibition featured a collection of 175 photographs of her family, mostly on film, in black and white and color photographs, taken over the span of a decade through travel and jet-lag, at work, on vacation, and at home.

Special Special hosts a 10 day pop-up on the second floor at the vibrant shopping mall of TX Huaihai Youth Energy Center. Featuring the Cyber Garden furniture installation from MAP along with a green screen backdrop to expand our imagined environment. 

Shanghai locals were invited to participate in a Plant Residency with their houseplants with corresponding profiles. Selected events included an eco-tourism art project with 0135 Travel Agency by artist Hersey Lin.

Custom design for a set of jacket, bag, and hat and packaging, incorporating Cai Guo Qiang’s artworks, that were gifted to VIP guests at the Palace Museum exhibition of Cai Guo Qiang’s Odyssey and Homecoming Exhibition.

Cyber Garden inaugurated the pop-up space at the Museum of Art Pudong (MAP). In the newly opened architecture designed by Jean Nouvel, Special Special activated the 2540 square feet pop-up space on the museum's ground floor with an immersive experience combining retail and digital art exhibition. Consisting of custom fabricated Cyber Garden furnitures that are a fusion of the natural with the synthetic, pastoral nature with cyberpunk. Pondering how gardening metaphors can nurture different understandings of the history of the World Wide Web. The internet becomes a sprawling garden of many paths, where files need "pruning" and "weeding", and ideas need to be "cultivated." 

Inspired by nostalgia for early millennial internet cafe culture, the "Internet Cafe" installation featured 8 digital art projects from artists around the world, including Max Bittker (US), Liu Chang (China), Will Doenlen (US), Heidi Latsky & Maya Man (US), Lullatone & Jono Brandel (US), Laurel Schwulst (US), ZZYW (US), and a VR installation by Sebastian Masuda (Japan)

The retail shop is merchandised with playful Special Special art editions, and custom products created for MAP.

Special Special presented a playground inspired retail pop-up at MGM Macau featuring playful artworks and products that engaged people of all ages to participate in an intimate shopping experience. The spirited nature of the venue offered an alternative space of engagement and retreat in the casino environment for visitors of all ages. The playground featured an extension of Sarah Verity's Love Hotel Rooms project from the previous year, this time titled Share a Room With Us. Visitors of all ages were encouraged to draw a room they love or to envision their ideal stay at the MGM hotel, and the drawings were presented side by side as a collective installation, along with a written message. With Aria McManus’s Towelkini, Mackenzie Younger’s Jackets, Jenny Hata Blumenfield’s cyanotypes and ceramic sculptures, as well as other elements of previous exhibitions and editions, the playground became a platform that expanded the creative dialogue from Special Special’s New York gallery across the world to Macau. 

Throughout the months of the pop-up, Special Special commissioned new cross cultural art editions such as Lu Zhang’s edition of Lion’s Feet Treasure Bowl, a playful, East-meets-West reintepretation of Lion’s Head and clawed vessels meant to enhance good fortune. Will Doenlen created an installation Without Wind, No Waves, a set of 3D individual playing cards about how randomness shapes our lives and, as a result who we are. The significance of both editions appropriately aligned with the resort and casino setting. 

For Inditex’s booth at the 2021 Chinese International Import Expo (CIIE), Special Special presented a Plant Adoption Bureau. The Adoption Bureau’s goal was to create a fulfilling and fun experience for visitors to adopt the many plants and trees at Inditex’s booth so that they could find new homes after the Expo, furthering Inditex’s commitment to sustainability in all aspects of its business.