Snow Yu
Ceramic Artist Snow Yu is the judge for the third annual Pottery of Protest Exhibition at Lincoln Square Pottery Studio – Learning Center in 2020.
Xue Jiao Yu, also known as Snow Yu, was born in 1988, in Jingdezhen, China. Yu grew up in a place that had pottery spilling into the streets. Jingdezhen, the “Porcelain Capital” of the world, has a thousand year long history of producing ceramics, with the modern industry still evolving. It was not unusual for Yu to see delicate vases stacked high, mere inches from the road or train tracks, as well as people pulling tipsy loads of pottery in wooden carts. It is of little wonder that she graduated with a BFA from the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in 2010. The Institute kept her in a traditional artistic mindset, which only started to shift after meeting international artists after her graduation.
The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen has up to twelve resident artists at their studios at a time, and Yu got to meet a lot of them over the six years she worked there. She led tours, translated lectures and guided the visiting artists across the city. She picked up skills of mold making, slip casting, coil building, wheel throwing and hand building. She met many impressive female artists, each one of them inspiring her in a different way. Anobeli Diaz (originally of Mexico, now residing in Sweden) stood out to Yu. Her massive hand built sculptures rooted in Mexican heritage and Neolithic style made Yu want to try her hand at creating a larger piece herself. Diaz left about 50lbs of clay for her to experiment with, which successfully turned into a life-sized self-portrait based on the Chinese mythology that all humans are made from one goddess. Only Yu re-imagined it as herself. The piece was left unfired, and remained untouched until Yu returned to China after going abroad for another degree.
Yu took the plunge and entered the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio in 2017 after meeting and being encouraged by two of its professors during the Pottery Workshop. The timing for this move was good for Yu because she had decided she needed to move forward in her art before she turned thirty. Culturally she was feeling pressure to marry and have children, but internally she knew she wanted to see what she could do as an artist. This push-pull between tradition and creative freedom has been a major well of source material for Yu. The University let her explore these dichotomies, as well as delving into fiber and video work. Yu’s visual style really started to take hold during her two years in Cincinnati. Themes of loneliness, compromise and a lack of belonging reoccurred in stage-like sets. Yu made sure to point spotlights on the work, further isolating the pieces in their exhibition space. Sheared bonsai stumps took over as a metaphor for society’s ability to mold and saw away an individual’s aspirations. Another piece titled “You” Were Never Really Here, delves into the reality of being an immigrant, and the dangers of trying to get to a place with more opportunities. Yu used the image of a road-killed deer (which she was shocked to see in America), which have to cross oncoming traffic to get to greener grass. She credits this flurry of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking to the years she spent observing the artists at the Pottery Workshop.
After graduating from the University of Cincinnati, Yu decided on a one-year artist residency at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago. Yu teaches courses in figure making and hand building, along with giving workshops and presentations. She is also, and most importantly, working on a series of life-size female figures made of a terracotta clay body. She hopes to complete five of them under the title “The space in between.” Yu is trying to capture women’s universal experiences in regards to society’s molding of them. She reveals the identity that sits underneath the layers of those heavy expectations. Her most current figure is now on view in the second floor gallery at Lillstreet.
Before Yu came to Chicago for her residency, she flew back home to Jingdezhen to create something new, and deal with some old work. She took a uterus-shaped sculpture and created a mold and copies of it while also teaching a 30-day course at the Pottery Workshop. She had each of the 50 pieces coated in gold using the Physical Vapor Deposition process. The work, titled “Uterus Trophy” was meant to start a conversation with other women about their own experiences in regards to reproduction, or lack there of. Yu has been collecting these poignant and emotional tales for a future project.
As a final act of growth and creative independence, Yu destroyed the self-portrait figure she had created from Anobeli Diaz’s clay before returning to America. She hired a worker to pull the unfired piece through the streets in a cart, and into an empty porcelain pottery factory. There she filmed herself breaking the form, as well as the old traditions and fears that no longer fit with the new and confident artist she had become.