The eggplant piece featured on the cover of Motif is the first completed work in Chenlu Hou’s Garden series, making it a perfect fit for this issue’s theme of Summer.
A low-fire terracotta sculpture, airbrushed and hand-painted with underglaze, the work is titled Eggplant braised with long beans, long beans braised with eggplant. Alongside other sculptures Hou created over the past two years, it was on display during May at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT.
“The sculpture is shaped after the long Chinese eggplant, which carries histories of cultivation, migration, and adaptation,” she explains; “how a once-bitter plant was shaped over the centuries through taste, labor, and everyday use.”
According to the artist, the front of the sculpture holds memories of her grandparents’ garden in the summer with its bounty of long eggplants, tomatoes, and long beans, with shimmering water nearby, and clouds moving quickly across the sky. “Braised eggplant appeared on the dinner table almost every day during summer,” she recalls, “familiar, sustaining, and never quite the same, as the title suggests: same vegetables, different ratios.”
The back of the sculpture shows an illustrative portrait of the plant, inspired by finding long eggplants at a Chinese grocery in PVD, where she lives. “Roasted eggplant with garlic and spice is a dish I often cook when hosting friends. Through food, memory travels, connections form, and continuity is quietly sustained,” she says.
Born in Shandong, China, Hou received her BA and MA in Decorative Arts from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2012 and 2016, respectively. She earned her MFA in Ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2019. Since then, the artist has completed residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Texas, and the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana.
Asked when she first got interested in art, Hou replies, “It’s kind of a family business.” Her father practices Shufa, the traditional Chinese art of brush calligraphy, as well as landscape painting, and her mother is an amazing knitter. “They both loved arts and crafts, and really emphasized the DIY spirit and the possibilities of using our hands to make unique objects,” she says.
One teacher particularly has been a huge inspiration to her: Professor Hongyu Tan back in China, who made documentaries about pottery-making traditions and techniques in southwest China. “Her work broadened my understanding of ceramics,” Hou says. “Through her films, I saw how pottery is connected to people, labor, migration, history, and everyday life, and how clay can carry stories across generations and landscapes. That deeply shaped the way I think about my own practice.”
During her MFA at RISD, Hou took an Open Media class taught by Professor Sheri Wills, which changed the way she thinks about video and time-based media. “Unfortunately, she passed away last October. But her work, knowledge, and generosity in teaching are still with me to this day,” Hou says.
Hou also cited Professors Denise Pelletier of Connecticut College, Lesley Baker of RISD, and Katy Schimert of RISD, who she called “amazing artists with their own unique approaches to clay.” The Chinese paper-cutting artists Ku Shulan and Xiyadie have likewise been inspirational to her.
This semester, Hou taught Advanced Studio at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt), Senior Thesis at RISD, and Metamorphic Clay at the Office for the Arts at Harvard.
Along with The Aldrich, Hou’s works have been included in exhibitions at the Kristen Lorello art gallery in NYC, YIRI Arts in Taipei City, Taiwan, the Houston Center, and Archie Bray.
“Since 2022, many of my sculptures have been inspired by folk traditions like paper cutting, embroidery, children’s toys, shadow puppetry, and other vernacular practices,” she says. “I reinterpret those forms and integrate them with my own stories, exploring ideas of belonging, the gains and losses of translation, the bias embedded in the rhetoric we use every day, and also the simple joy of making.”
Hou listens to music while she’s creating. Lately, she says she’s been obsessed with the album The Handover by the Egyptian group of the same name, which explores the senses of Egypt’s ritual music.
“I hope my work can remind people of the importance of art, the value and joy of making things with their hands,” Hou concludes. “I want the sculptures to feel approachable and familiar at first, but slowly reveal layered emotions, unfolding stories, and histories, the longer people spend time with them.”
–John Picinich
Hou’s artwork can be viewed at her website chenluhou.cargo.site, and on Instagram @chenlu_hou.