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Artist Statement
Yen Qin uses the medium of ceramics as a conduit to reconnect with her Peranakan Chinese ancestral roots while exploring her lived experience growing up as an Asian woman in Australia.
Yen Qin's connection with ceramics goes beyond its materiality and artistic expression, it is also rooted in the medium’s historical and cultural contexts. In researching the significance of ceramics in her culture, Yen Qin unearths stories and ancestral customs lost over centuries of her family’s diaspora.
Yen Qin's practice engages with the potential of cultural exchange and amalgamation, exploring the power of objects to transcend differences and foster understanding. Her works extend an invitation to viewers to participate in their own cultural rediscovery, creating a space that celebrates heritage and cultural identity within contemporary life.
Theme: BLUE
This body of work marks a new experimental direction in my practice. Working exclusively in porcelain (a material synonymous with China), I’m exploring the visual language of blue and white ceramics not through hand-painted decoration, but through glaze chemistry, material interaction, and the unpredictability of the firing process.
The works move away from traditional vessel logic toward abstraction and sculptural presence. Forms are minimal and softly contoured, scaled larger than my previous pieces, allowing surface to carry the primary visual weight. Layered blues, tonal shifts, and painterly effects emerge through firing rather than direct control.
Referencing the long and mobile history of blue and white ceramics, these works engage a tradition shaped by trade, migration, appropriation, and adaptation, to the point where its origins have become diffuse over time. This history parallels my own process of retracing my roots, where family histories and cultural inheritances are fragmented and distorted through time and geographical movement.
Rather than relying on fixed ornament or symbolism, as is often the case with blue and white ceramics, I’m leaning into chance as a conceptual and material strategy. By allowing glaze chemistry and kiln conditions to guide the surface, uncertainty becomes intentional. Surface becomes a site of discovery rather than decoration, reflecting the diasporic condition itself, formed through risk, adaptation, and outcomes that cannot be fully predicted.
— Yen Qin, Kew, Victoria
