Ling Chun is a Hong Kong-born ceramics artist who likes to play with hair. A beauty school dropout, she received her MFA in ceramics at Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and has introduced hair into her ceramics instead of styling it. Her ceramic forms are “playgrounds for glaze,” and she likes to challenge the rules and roles of ceramics by disassociating the material from its stereotypical or culturally accepted uses. Removing still-hot pieces from the kiln, Chun applies liquid glazes to the surface creating a sizzling sound and a haze of steam until the glaze sticks. It is an intuitive process that emerges through multiple firings and layers of glaze. The work is born of the spontaneous dripping, sliding, running, climbing and crawling that occurs; the movement of the material is her medium.
Chun has been in several international renowned artist residency programs, including a long-term residency at Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana (2016-18). She has also received a Matsutani Fellowship, Lilian Fellowship and travel grant for oversea residencies including c.r.e.t.a. Rome and Aquatopia in Puebla, Mexico. Recently, her achievement in the field of ceramics granted her extended stay in the United States on an O-1B Visa recognizing her extraordinary ability in the arts. She is now a long-term resident of Pottery Northwest in Seattle, Washington (2018-20), where she continuous her studio practice.
Lean
Language fluxes with culture, ceramics fluxes with heat.
I put myself in the situation of glaze, to be fluid within space.
Flowing and shaping within the culture that I am in, like a glaze with heat
and how clay drips and leans.
I may not be the kind of Chinese you are expecting,
to appear in a form that is familiar to you, but
the truth is, I am just me.
Who I am or what I think, or how I feel,
Expressions of words in Cantonese, but
Forms of art I learned in English.
Words I cannot use and the void I cannot fill.
It is there that my work can be found at will.
Can you feel me too?
Ling Chun