Heidi Lau Bridges Heaven and Earth in Otherworldly Ceramics

It’s the latest in a series of noteworthy presentations for the artist, who also recently had her work featured in a major exhibition at The Met and next year will be a part of a two-artist show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco. Lau’s unconventional spin on a traditional medium, combined with her Chinese mythologic and folkloric inspirations, is what distinguishes her practice—but it’s the primal aesthetic of her work that first draws you in.

“I need to make something that is equally beautiful and grotesque,” said Lau as she sipped her coffee at the M+ museum cafe. From that vantage, we could glimpse a sliver of her installation below, which evokes a bridge between the heavens and Earth.

Multiple chains adorned with ambiguous ceramic objects, such as morphed, pagoda-topped vessels and otherworldly, UFO-like forms, cascade down from the ceiling. Below, contorted vessels are configured over two platforms, as if placed on an altar or shrine. Everything appears to be molten—either in mid-formation or mid-destruction. This miniature, disordered universe is tinged with sage greens, dusty pinks, faded lilacs, and searing bright blues.

Lau points out the intricate details of a larger blue structure fashioned after an anagama kiln—an ancient Japanese furnace designed to resemble a dragon. Embedded in the vessel’s active surface are a small pair of hands, masked faces, and even a small flame, perhaps referencing the firing process. While its form is inspired by the anagama, it also refers to a human-faced dragon that appears in Shanhaijing. This foundational Chinese text, which has existed in some form since the 4th century B.C.E., is a source of numerous fantastical hybrid creatures that have fascinated Lau for years.

Along with the human-faced dragon, snake goddesses, faceless pigs, and frogs with nine tails have also made appearances in the artist’s work. “There are beings that are split in half: They only have one leg or arm. Then there are creatures which exist for the sole purpose of taking revenge,” said Lau. “They live according to their own purpose and subjectivity—they’re not here to serve anyone else or another purpose.”

Lau’s interest in these creatures is personal. She views their otherworldly differences as equivalent to real-world mental illness and disabilities, which impact both her father and brother. “I want to reframe the way we think about mental illness and disabilities, from seeing it as a weakness to a rejection of normality,” the artist explained. “Our body’s worth shouldn’t be measured by how useful it can be for production.”

A similar line of thinking informs her interest in technology, which she endeavors to make “poetic, useless, or even witchy.” In Pavilion Procession, Lau incorporated a technological element in her work for the first time. A ceramic spider sits in the midst of the installation and occasionally crawls in a jerky manner. “It was programmed to limp like my brother and my father,” the artist explained. She took videos of them walking and worked with a collaborator to program the robot accordingly, creating something intentionally glitchy.

“I wanted to make him anti-productive. He’s scheduled to take four naps a day,” she said, emphasizing that the spider won’t be disturbed for anyone—no matter which VIP may visit.

Lau’s fresh approach to ceramics is perhaps a product of having never studied it formally: Her BFA, from New York University, is in printmaking. After graduating in 2008, she worked at a studio that produced prints for many well-known artists, but a grueling schedule left her burned out. During a residency in Donegal, Ireland, in 2012, Lau tried her hand at pottery at the behest of her studio-mate and “got hooked,” she said. In 2016, she won the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painters & Sculptors Grant, which enabled her to rent a studio and buy a kiln.

Lau crafts all of her work by hand, engraving a range of motifs, symbols, and crevices into clay with a needle tool. “To be able to give an actual physical form to something that didn’t previously exist is empowering,” said Lau about her haptic process. “I feel like there’s a current, power, or energy you impart onto the object, which was something I never felt with printed material.” At the same time, she relishes the energy that the medium gives back and rejects the narrative that the sculptor is the master of her material: “I feel like I’m also the medium, and clay and I are laboring together. It’s a less hierarchical relationship.”

In navigating her urge to control versus yield—a struggle that is manifest in the aesthetics of her writhing sculptures—Lau attempts to find a kind of balance, similar to that sought in Daoism. The artist was exposed to both Daoism and art through her grandfather, an accomplished Chinese calligrapher. He taught her that calligraphy and drawing were cultural practices, not a full-time job. “My grandfather made me swear in front of my ancestors that I wouldn’t pursue a career in art,” said Lau sheepishly. “That didn’t exactly happen.”

Whether or not her ancestors would approve, family is essential to Lau’s practice. After her mother’s passing in 2016, Lau processed her grief by creating a ceramic burial robe. Later works continued to incorporate elements modeled after ancient Chinese burial paraphernalia. For example, From the Heart of the Mountain Anchored the Path of Unknowing (2023)—which was on view at the Met for its 2025 exhibition “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie” and is now part of the institution’s collection—was inspired by ancient funerary vessels. Its totemic structure recalls the spine of a gigantic mythical creature.

For Lau, the loss of her mother is linked to a sense of fraying cultural identity. The pagoda-shaped vessels in many of her pieces are reminiscent of the disappearing tenement buildings in Macau and evoke her own evolving connection to the region, which she left for New York in 2006. “I never feel like I fit in fully, not in New York and not in Macau,” she said. “And since my mother passed away, my relationship with Macau is less defined.”

Urban architecture collided with a number of Lau’s other conceptual preoccupations—grief, ancestry, myth—in 2021, when she was the first-ever artist in residence at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. There, she created a site-specific work, Gardens as Cosmic Terrains (2022), installed in the facility’s catacombs. “It took physically working in that environment, and having the work exhibited in the catacombs, for me to convey my thoughts on burial grounds as transitional spaces where the objecthood of humans dissipates while objects take on animistic qualities,” Lau wrote to me. The work was a result of her research into the structural and cosmological features of Chinese gardens, sometimes interpreted as portals into a spiritual realm.

Lau’s practice is an ongoing effort to build such portals—between Earth and the cosmos; between the ordinary and the spiritual—via clay. “It’s a devotional practice,” she said. “Almost like religion, you practice every day, regardless of the outcome.”