Artist Statement

My work explores the balance between dualities, including restraint and freedom, memory and loss, and dislocation and belonging, shaped by my migration between China and the United States, within conditions of cultural fragmentation. I approach emotion as a spatial and temporal condition that unfolds through cultural memory, physical form, and lived experience. Rather than illustrating named emotions, I investigate states that exist before language, creating fragile yet enduring ceramic sculptures, wall pieces, and installations that give physical presence to feelings that resist definition and invite viewers to sense rather than interpret.

Using hand-building, slip casting, and image transfer with stoneware and porcelain paper clay, I treat clay as a material of duration that records pressure, touch, and historical residue. Organic forms reminiscent of coral, sediment, or bodily matter coexist with geometric structures, articulating tensions between growth and control, vulnerability and stability. These compositions construct environments where emotion is both personal and collective, abstract yet embodied, shaped by time, displacement, and survival.

Informed by Daoist and Confucian philosophies, particularly relational thinking and cyclical approaches to time and nature, my work invites quiet contemplation rather than resolution. Like the natural world, emotions are constantly transforming. Through ambiguity, fragility, and accumulation, my work offers space for empathy and introspection, where change is held and witnessed rather than explained.

Biography

Renqian Yang is an artist and Associate Professor of Ceramics at SUNY Oswego, New York. She received her B.F.A. in Ceramics from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, China (2009), and her M.F.A. from Syracuse University (2014). Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States, the UK, China, South Korea, and Japan, and in 2024 was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for its permanent collection. She is currently featured in Dimensions: Contemporary Chinese Studio Crafts at the V&A in South Kensington, London.

Her solo exhibitions include Folding Time Between Worlds at Tyler Art Gallery (2024), Retrace at Jingdezhen International Studio (2024), Sounds of the Ephemeral at Fou Gallery (2021), and the Cayuga Museum of History and Art (2019). Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (2025), the Featherstone Center for the Arts in Martha’s Vineyard (2025), and in several NCECA concurrent exhibitions (2021, 2023, 2024).

Internationally, Yang has exhibited in competitions and museum shows such as the Shiwan Ceramics Museum, Foshan, Guangdong, China (2023), and the Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, Toyama, Japan (2021). She has been awarded residencies at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (2017, 2023), Craigardan (2018), Jingdezhen International Studio (2018, 2023), and STARworks, North Carolina (2022). Her work was also presented in the Korea–China Ceramic Art Exhibition (South Korea, 2022) and at the Korea National Assembly Proceeding Hall, Seoul (2023), celebrating 30 years of diplomatic relations between the two nations. In December 2025, her work was featured in the 15th Anniversary Edition of Ceramics Now Magazine.

SELECTED NEWS

SELECTED CATALOGUES

  •   “Korea-China Ceramic Art Symposium” catalog, ye’s park ceramics art village, Icheon, South Korea, 2022

  • “With Roots Deep, Foliage Thrives – 根 深 叶 茂”- A Vision of Chinese Artists in American Academia 2022, Art and Design Exhibition catalog.

  • Rivers Connect Unstoppable Forces in Contemporary Ceramics, exhibition catalog, Northern Kentucky University, Syracuse University.2021

  • “International KOGEI Award in TOYAMA 2020” Exhibition catalog, Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, Toyama Japan, 2021

  • Renqian Yang: Urban Microcosmos (exhibition brochure). Text by Echo He. New York: Fou Gallery, 2018.

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