Contemporary ceramic artist Heidi Lau has been selected for The Artsy Vanguard 2026, a prestigious recognition highlighting the most promising artists working today. The Macau-born, New York-based artist draws inspiration from ancient Chinese mythology, particularly the hundun—a faceless being resembling a pig that appears across Daoist, Confucian, and Chinese myths as an agent of chaos and symbol of primordial disorder.
Lau's latest work, "Pavilion Procession" (2025), currently on display at Hong Kong's M museum, embodies this mythological inspiration through amorphous ceramics that exist between raw chaos and sculpted order. The piece is featured as part of the museum's Sigg Prize, a biennial award celebrating artists in or from the greater China region and its diaspora, for which Lau was shortlisted this year.
The installation represents a significant milestone in Lau's rising career, which has recently included major exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and an upcoming two-artist show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco next year. Her unconventional approach to traditional ceramics, combined with Chinese mythological and folkloric inspirations, distinguishes her practice through what she calls a "primal aesthetic."
"I need to make something that is equally beautiful and grotesque," Lau explained during an interview at the M museum cafe, where visitors can glimpse her installation below, which evokes a bridge between the heavens and Earth. The work features multiple chains adorned with ambiguous ceramic objects, including morphed, pagoda-topped vessels and otherworldly, UFO-like forms cascading from the ceiling, while contorted vessels are arranged on two platforms like an altar or shrine.
The installation's color palette of sage greens, dusty pinks, faded lilacs, and searing bright blues creates a miniature, disordered universe where everything appears molten—either in mid-formation or mid-destruction. A larger blue structure fashioned after an anagama kiln, an ancient Japanese furnace designed to resemble a dragon, features intricate details including embedded hands, masked faces, and small flames referencing the firing process.
Lau's artistic inspiration stems from the "Shanhaijing," a foundational Chinese text dating back to the 4th century B.C.E. that describes fantastical hybrid creatures including human-faced dragons, snake goddesses, faceless pigs, and nine-tailed frogs. "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," Lau noted. "They live according to their own purpose and subjectivity—they're not here to serve anyone else or another purpose."
This fascination with otherworldly creatures carries personal significance for Lau, who views their differences as equivalent to real-world mental illness and disabilities, conditions that affect 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," she explained. "Our body's worth shouldn't be measured by how useful it can be for production."
For the first time in her work, Lau incorporated technology into "Pavilion Procession" through a ceramic spider that occasionally crawls in a jerky manner. She programmed the robot to limp like her brother and father, working with a collaborator to create something intentionally glitchy and "anti-productive." The spider is scheduled to take four naps a day and won't be disturbed for any VIP visitors, emphasizing her rejection of conventional productivity measures.
Lau's fresh approach to ceramics stems from her unconventional background—she never formally studied the medium, earning her BFA from New York University in printmaking in 2008. After working at a studio producing prints for well-known artists left her burned out, she discovered pottery during a 2012 residency in Donegal, Ireland, at her studio-mate's suggestion. The 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant enabled her to rent a studio and purchase a kiln.
Working entirely by hand, Lau engraves motifs, symbols, and crevices into clay using a needle tool. "To be able to give an actual physical form to something that didn't previously exist is empowering," she said 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." She rejects the traditional sculptor-as-master narrative, instead viewing herself as a medium collaborating with clay in a less hierarchical relationship.
Family history deeply influences Lau's practice, beginning with her grandfather, an accomplished Chinese calligrapher who taught her that calligraphy and drawing were cultural practices, not full-time careers. "My grandfather made me swear in front of my ancestors that I wouldn't pursue a career in art," Lau admitted sheepishly. Her mother's death in 2016 profoundly impacted her work, leading her to process grief by creating a ceramic burial robe and incorporating elements modeled after ancient Chinese burial paraphernalia in subsequent pieces.
Her work "From the Heart of the Mountain Anchored the Path of Unknowing" (2023), inspired by ancient funerary vessels and now part of The Met's permanent collection, was featured in the museum's 2025 exhibition "Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie." The totemic structure recalls the spine of a gigantic mythical creature, reflecting Lau's ongoing exploration of death, ancestry, and cultural identity.
The pagoda-shaped vessels throughout her work evoke the disappearing tenement buildings of Macau and her evolving connection to the region she left for New York in 2006. "I never feel like I fit in fully, not in New York and not in Macau," she reflected. "And since my mother passed away, my relationship with Macau is less defined." This sense of cultural displacement, combined with themes of grief, ancestry, and mythology, culminated during her groundbreaking 2021 residency as the first-ever artist-in-residence at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
At Green-Wood, Lau created "Gardens as Cosmic Terrains" (2022), a site-specific installation in the cemetery's catacombs that emerged from her research into Chinese gardens' structural and cosmological features, sometimes interpreted as spiritual portals. "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," she explained.
Lau's artistic practice represents an ongoing effort to build portals between Earth and the cosmos, between the ordinary and spiritual, through her clay work. "It's a devotional practice," she concluded. "Almost like religion, you practice every day, regardless of the outcome." As part of The Artsy Vanguard 2026's eighth year highlighting promising contemporary artists, Lau joins nine other talents poised to become future leaders of contemporary art and culture.
