Deviations

“Deviation” is a central theme in my ceramic practice both technically and philosophically. My continuous research in art history informs how I engage with form and surface, while my personal history infuses the work with a deeper inquiry into identity and dissonance.

Although I am heritably Chinese and grew up overseas, it wasn’t until I rerooted in the United States in 2008 that the world of visual art truly opened to me. In China, “norms” felt narrow and predetermined often presented as an external voice that demanded conformity. I grew up feeling like a misfit, expected to reshape myself to fit a model I didn’t choose. Deviation, then, became both an act of resistance and a form of reclamation.

In the studio, this manifests materially. I welcome warping, cracking, and irregularity not as flaws, but as the clay’s refusal to conform. These deviations from the “idealized form” are not errors they are essences and evidences of nature takes its course in the studio. They are moments of truth, where presence overrides perfection. The clay remembers every touch, every hesitation. It stretches, resists, collapses. It speaks in the language of tension, unpredictability, and response.

I am drawn to unfinished edges, uneven glazes, and subtle warps that pull the eye off-center. These gestures carry emotional weight. They echo the way I’ve come to understand identity not as fixed or symmetrical, but as something shaped through rupture, friction, and reconfiguration. My practice lives in the space between control and surrender. I enter the studio with a plan, but I never expect the material to be commanded or dictated fully. It’s a dance between several tonalities between me and the material. I listen. I adjust. I allow the form to speak back.

Deviation, in this way, becomes collaboration. A method. A voice. A place of agency, poetry, dance and vessels of becoming.