When Butterflies Don't Need Soft Hands

Product description

It is a pot, but also a place you can ‘go in and out’ with your eyes and hands. Here, you are invited to imagine the romantic tour in a park, sitting by the ‘fountain’ and meeting my giant female character ‘Mrs. Penelope’ referencing the ideal wife of solitary and immobility in Odyssey. A free hand craved vessel with a ‘Stream of Consciousness’ approach to bring several ‘alternative versions’ of Mrs. Penelope in her growth around the pot as both the life giver and the vibrant life itself.

Qi works primarily with hand-built and thrown high-fire (1220°C) white stoneware with free-hand carved and inlaid original designs. The illustrated works celebrate different carving techniques (Huahua technique in Chinese, or Mishima, and sgraffito) on ceramics and are decorated using decorative slips and underglazes.

Qi’s ceramics search for conversations and mutual encouragement between the object and her carved drawings, which are deeply inspired by Taoism and Phenomenology philosophy. The works are known for their quirky, playful and symbolic narrative representation of the transforming identity, human-nature interactions, feminism, and cultural boundaries.

Rather than following a well-planned blueprint, Qi free-hand carves the organic shapes she builds, allowing the shape of the clay and drawing determine the composition. Like a spreading vine, her expressive pictures find ways to shape the object, forming the outlines and content, vice versa, to capture the flow of consciousness, self-invented visual narratives and personal emotions. Instead of searching for uniformity and certainty, her ceramics call for a curiosity of the unknown, abnormal and asymmetrical.

Qi is also exhibiting several wall works - Ink Drawings and Watercolour / Collage works.