Opening Reception: August 28, 2026, 7-9pm featuring free refreshments and live music
This exhibition, Future Relics - An Archaeology of the Present, positions the contemporary moment as a future excavation site. Through large-scale ceramic installations, hybrid digital–physical processes, and sculptural fragments that hover between ruin and reconstruction, the exhibition imagines how our present might be interpreted centuries from now. What will survive when technologies shift faster than human habits, emotions, and cultural infrastructures? What forms of memory will be preserved, distorted, or erased? The exhibition expands upon the inherent paradox of ceramics: it is simultaneously one of the oldest human technologies and one of the most vulnerable to breakage, erosion, and loss. In Yoyo Hu’s practice, this paradox becomes a metaphor for the instability of the digital age. Works often begin as 3D scans or modeled surfaces—smooth, idealized, infinitely modifiable. But once translated into clay, fired, and reassembled, they accumulate cracks, irregular textures, or intentional ruptures. These material imperfections echo the fractures in contemporary identity: the tension between curated digital selves and the physical realities we inhabit.
As artificial intelligence increasingly intervenes in perception, labor, creativity, and decision-making, the exhibition asks what forms of humanity might remain legible in the distant future. Will our technologies be seen as extensions of our bodies, or as monuments to our anxieties?
Will future civilizations understand the emotional and spiritual life embedded in our artifacts, or will they read our traces only through the lens of data and utility?
Hu’s installations operate at an architectural scale, resembling archaeological walls, stratified terrains, or ceremonial fragments whose functions have been lost. Light plays a crucial role, illuminating fractures, casting moving shadows, or exposing internal cavities—suggesting that illumination in the age of AI is always double-edged: revealing and obscuring, clarifying and distorting.
Future Relics ultimately proposes that the artifacts of our time—hybrid bodies, digital ruins, reconstructed memories—are not endpoints but transitions. They remind us that every era imagines itself at the center of history, yet every era becomes sediment.
Yoyo Hu is a Chinese-born sculptor and installation artist whose practice bridges ancient craftsmanship with emerging technologies such as 3D modeling, 3D printing, slip casting, and ceramic light-based installation. Her works construct a unique visual language that oscillates between “future relics” and “archaeologies of tomorrow,” questioning what traces of human existence will endure as technology reshapes our world at unprecedented speed.
Central to Hu’s artistic inquiry are the tensions between permanence and impermanence, tradition and innovation, memory and temporality. Her early work focused on figurative sculpture inspired by Chinese historical art and cultural narratives. She trained in this subject matter while studying oil painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China. Over time and during her further studies at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, she transitioned from painting to large-scale sculptural installations. Yet, the characters and symbolic imagery from her early practice continue to inhabit her new works in transformed ways. They live on as fragments, shadows, and metaphoric presences embedded within architectural, ceramic, and light-based structures.
Her work reflects profound meditations on homesickness, cultural identity, the search for meaning, and the erosion and reconstruction of memory. By merging the tactile history of ceramics with the precision of digital technologies, Hu creates immersive environments that invite viewers to contemplate humanity’s dialogue with time—its past, its future, and the uncertain terrain shaped by artificial intelligence and rapid technological evolution.
Yoyo Hu, close up of Journey to the West, 2025, porcelain, 25 x 228 inches
The exhibition invites viewers to ask:
When future archaeologists sift through the remains of the 21st century, what stories will our fractured technologies, bodies, and memories tell about us?