Thandi Cai (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Memphis, Tennessee, and working across the country. They co-founded the Meng Cheng Collective and directed the documentary Bluff City Chinese. Find their work at thandicai.com.

This profile is part of a series introducing the artists and cultural workers in the Outside In Arts and Culture Fellowship, a part of Smart Growth America's Outside In project. The project documents the histories and futures of suburban Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities across Atlanta, Dallas, and Memphis.

Thandi Cai, the child of Chinese and Indonesian immigrant parents, grew up in Germantown, a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee. They’ve spent their career in film, textiles, performance, and community practice asking about migration, belonging, and identity. Through this work, Thandi has focused on the same question again and again: How do Asian diasporic communities in the South make themselves legible to themselves and to each other?

Their documentary Bluff City Chinese, which premiered in 2024 and is now in its second year of distribution, draws from their deep immersion in Memphis's Chinese American community. Through the Outside In fellowship, Thandi is now exploring the stories of Memphis’s Indonesian community situated in Memphis's suburbs and the small towns of Mississippi, seeking to connect their creative practice to the systems that shape suburban life.

The conversation below has been organized and condensed for clarity.

Tell us about your creative practice, and what you're thinking about right now.

I identify as an interdisciplinary artist. I work across mediums—performance art, design, filmmaking, textile art, community practice—all in service of exploring Asian diasporic identities in the South, and more broadly how humans migrate and how we create identity.

Right now, I'm in the second year of distribution for my documentary and am thinking about how it can be a tool for conversations across all kinds of communities. I'm interested in exploring more about how to tell stories from the Indonesian community I'm part of in Memphis, thinking through projects about cross-racial and pan-Asian solidarity—work that speaks to a broader group within the diaspora while creating more meaningful relationships among the people in it.

How does that connect to the suburban AAPI communities Outside In is documenting?

A lot of my earlier work was about creating spaces for people to come together in the Chinese community. Learning what works and what doesn't made me curious about how to expand that across other AAPI communities I'm part of.

The Indonesian community in Memphis is really unique—it's squarely situated in the suburbs and in smaller rural towns in Mississippi. We have a lot of informal structures of gathering. Compared to the Chinese community, it's a lot less organized, and there's a reluctance to formalize anything.

My aunties sell out at the Lunar New Year fair, but don't want to commercialize that food-making and sharing. Within the broader Asian community, the public has very clear ideas of what Asian means, and Indonesian people are often not part of that. They see themselves as part of it, but they don't see themselves in it. It's like a puzzle within a puzzle.

Has learning about planning and suburban land use through the Outside In fellowship changed how you see the places you know?

I have my undergrad degree in architecture and urban design, but the fellowship is giving me the space to connect my degree with my current work, which has a lot more to do with identity—and I didn't have that background when I was learning these stories. Once I can visualize or imagine the spaces we're talking about, it's easier to see how we're all affected by the decisions being made about how our cities are designed. That's such a fruitful way to think through the experiences we have, and therefore the stories we tell, and how those stories interlink.

It's also an affirmation of my own experience living in the suburbs, which gets seen as a kind of wasteland, like there's no culture there. But in fact, for a lot of Asian communities, that's the reality.

How do you see artists shaping the built environment?

Something that happens a lot is that artists are thought of as decorative—not part of the solution, but a reflection of it. Instead of artists being part of systemic change from the root, it's like, “We'll bring artists in, they'll make things beautiful, and people will fall in love with what we've done.”

What I love about this program is the urban planning aspect, because the way everybody experiences space is so physiological and embodied. You can plan a transportation system or a grid, but the way people interact with it day to day—that's something artists are really critical for thinking through. It doesn't have to show up as a mural. Sometimes it's more nuanced than that. The more people are open to that nuance, the more artists are part of the conversation.

Where is your own work heading?

It's been made very clear to me that my work is not about object-making. I'm being drawn to things that are more about action. I'm disturbed by how certain policies and local government are affecting where I'm from, and I don't like to stay in a feeling of powerlessness, so I've been seeking opportunities to see my art in a more civically minded way.

We have a lot of privilege as Asian people, but we also carry the grit our ancestors developed over centuries to get here. To do that justice is to ask how I exercise that muscle with the privilege I have in the cities where I live. I want people's experience of their own history to feel like a battery—a source of energy they can draw on to navigate their city—or a resource to use as they think through how a policy affects their neighborhood.

Why does Outside In matter?

It's never been done before, . So we have to do it—to see what will happen. There's an essay I've been sitting with called "Critical Yeast." Critical mass is when you get a lot of people together at once, and that moves the needle a certain way. But critical yeast is the thing that builds on itself and keeps fermenting over time—that's what builds the bread in the long term. It feels like right now, we're trying to cultivate that yeast. We're a small group of people, really moving on our passions, trying to see what happens if we put these things together.