HEIDI LAU
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 (born 1987) grew up in Macau and lives and works in New York. Selected solo and two person exhibitions include Chrysalis Spectre, with Leelee Chan, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2024); A Cacophony of Rocks, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2024); Shadow Speak, with Biraaj Dodiya, Bureau, New York (2023); Gardens as Cosmic Terrains, Green-Wood Cemetery, New York (2022); Spirit Vessels, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); The Primordial Molder, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2017); and The Obscure Region II, Macau Art Museum, Macau (2014), among others. In 2019, Lau presented Apparition for the Macau-China Collateral Exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale.
Recent group exhibitions include Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2025); The Jealous Potter at UCCA Clay, Yixing (2025); Shanshui: Echoes and Signals at M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2024); Cosmos Cinema: The 14th Shanghai Biennale at Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2023); and Liquid Ground at UCCA, Beijing (2022) and Para Site, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong (2021), among others.
Lau is the recipient of the Sigg Prize 2025 by M+ Museum of Visual Culture in Hong Kong. Her installation, Pavilion Procession, is currently on view at M+ in a group exhibition of works by the six Prize finalists.
Lau’s work is included in the collections of The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York; CC Foundation, Shanghai; Kadist Art Foundation; the M+ Museum in Hong Kong; Macau Museum of Art, Macau; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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