Heidi Lau Macau, born 1987

Heidi Lau’s sculpture practice views clay as the ideal conduit to explore the malleability and materiality of time. Ranging in size from intimately-scaled figures to site-responsive installations, Lau’s ceramics trace the “landscape experience” often found in traditional Chinese paintings. Her hand-built formations of clay meld a zoomorphic sensibility with the totemic presence of ritual items and primordial monuments: stacked tiers evoke an architectural column or the spine of a massive creature, while various earthen surfaces of green, white, and blue glazing recall the likeness of overgrown ruins or coral structures. Drawing upon mythological, historical, and environmental source narratives, Lau’s work suggests anti-categorical, pluralistic imaginings of material and space, channeled through personal memory. 

Vessels, for Lau, are a type of world-building and world-holding. Since 2020, Lau has worked on an ongoing body of sculptural figures influenced by mingqi—ancient Chinese burial goods that first came into prevalence during the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD). Made with a combination of glazed clay, glass, and bronze, Lau’s vessels are a chimeric embodiment of mythic landscapes, funerary objects, and spiritual relics. They elude a simplistic appeal to an intangible—and perhaps imagined—natural order, but rather capture the cyclical, resonant conditions of growth, decay, grief, and remembrance. 

Heidi Lau grew up in Macau and lives and works in New York. In 2021, she was the inaugural artist-in-residence at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Her installation Gardens as Cosmic Terrains was exhibited in the Cemetery catacombs in 2022, and drew from her ongoing research on Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas)  and the cosmological settings of Chinese gardens. Notable solo presentations include Empire Recast, Grand Lisboa Palace, Macau (2021); Spirit Vessels, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); and The Primordial Molder, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2017). In 2019, her exhibition Apparition was presented at the Macau-China Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale.

Lau is the recipient of awards and residences such as Green-Wood Cemetery Residency (2021); NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship (2020); the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2017); and the Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship (2014), among others. Lau’s work is included in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Macao Museum of Art, and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong.