Yoyo Hu: Future Relics

The John Natsoulas Gallery is proud to announce the major exhibition of ceramic installation artist, Yoyo Hu, opening August 2026. The large-scale artworks in this exhibition challenge viewers to consider both porcelain and storytelling in new ways while contemplating these immense ceramic installations that draw from the artist’s Chinese heritage.

Future Relics positions the contemporary moment as a future excavation site, striving to suggest through fragmentation, that the artworks hover between ruin and reconstruction. Hu carefully considers how future historians and archaeologists will perceive the present, notably in the face of ever evolving technologies that shift human habits, emotions, and infrastructures. She ultimately asks, what forms of memory will be preserved, distorted, or erased. By utilizing one of the oldest human technologies – ceramics – she prompts further thought on the matter of what survives and what is vulnerable to loss. Hu’s inventive combinations of artistic techniques, blending the ancient and the ultra-contemporary, reflect her fascination with the possibilities engendered by modernity. Use of 3-D modeling and printing is a hallmark of her process. It allows her to develop installations at an architectural scale, but it also provides her with the ability to plan and introduce electrical components such as LED lights into her compositions as notable additional mediums.

Hu’s powerful questions about the future remain in compelling conversation with the past – as she addresses the history of her hometown and her family. The large-scale Beneath the Mountain installation is a direct commentary on the geography of that town, and its war-time origins. Air-raid shelters, carved into the cliffs, housed her grandmother during the traumatic bombings during WWII. By drawing on the mythological stories and characters that shape the very foundations of Chinese culture, Hu builds worlds that reflect not just that ancient past, but the stories of her and her family. She imbues her artwork, through a drive to preserve personal narratives, with the spirit she sees so clearly in the artwork of ancient civilizations. In the four distinct installations in the exhibition, survival and transformation remain as the underlying threads.

Yoyo Hu is a Chinese-born sculptor and installation artist based in the Bay Area. Born and raised in Chongquing, Hu builds large ceramic installations that function as imaged ruins. Originally trained in traditional painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, she later discovered her passion for clay. She went on to receive an MFA from the Academy of Art University, and has since established a studio in Berkeley.

The exhibition’s opening reception will be held on August 28, from 7 to 9 PM. It will feature live music and refreshments.