Artwork description: Porous Presences encases displaced second-hand ceramics in fragile lampworked glass, using Daoist wu to explore cultural drift, non-belonging, and the porous boundaries of identity.
Artwork description long: Porous Presences brings together five second-hand ceramic objects collected from charity shops across the UK. Made in different countries and once embedded in domestic life, they have been displaced through resale, detached from their original functions, owners, and cultural contexts. As a Chinese artist living and working in the UK, I recognise in these objects a condition that echoes my own: visible yet marginal, present yet never fully assimilated. I enclose each object within a hand-formed network of lampworked borosilicate glass. The transparent structure appears to protect and contain, yet its openings prevent it from becoming a sealed boundary. Glass therefore operates both materially and philosophically. Its fragile, almost immaterial presence evokes the Daoist concept of wu (non-being): not an empty void, but an open field of undefined potential in which relationships can emerge. Within the installation, even British ceramics become “othered”—forgotten, stripped of use, and repositioned beside objects from elsewhere. The glass neither restores their former identities nor absorbs them into a single whole. Instead, it holds difference in a precarious coexistence. Through the tension between transparency and enclosure, protection and restriction, Porous Presences reflects on cultural drift, blurred identity, belonging, and the fragile boundaries through which people and objects are perceived.
Artwork description long: Porous Presences brings together five second-hand ceramic objects collected from charity shops across the UK. Made in different countries and once embedded in domestic life, they have been displaced through resale, detached from their original functions, owners, and cultural contexts. As a Chinese artist living and working in the UK, I recognise in these objects a condition that echoes my own: visible yet marginal, present yet never fully assimilated. I enclose each object within a hand-formed network of lampworked borosilicate glass. The transparent structure appears to protect and contain, yet its openings prevent it from becoming a sealed boundary. Glass therefore operates both materially and philosophically. Its fragile, almost immaterial presence evokes the Daoist concept of wu (non-being): not an empty void, but an open field of undefined potential in which relationships can emerge. Within the installation, even British ceramics become “othered”—forgotten, stripped of use, and repositioned beside objects from elsewhere. The glass neither restores their former identities nor absorbs them into a single whole. Instead, it holds difference in a precarious coexistence. Through the tension between transparency and enclosure, protection and restriction, Porous Presences reflects on cultural drift, blurred identity, belonging, and the fragile boundaries through which people and objects are perceived.