RIDGEFIELD, CONN.- Chenlu Hou’s objects draw from her Chinese heritage, blending folklore, remembrance, and the layered experiences of diaspora and cultural hybridity. Chiara No creates chiming bells that personify idols, demons, and goddesses inspired by ancient, pagan, and Christian mythologies. Both artists make objects that suggest the potential for sound to invoke ceremony and shared histories across cultures and time.
Chenlu Hou works across drawing, animation, and ceramic sculpture. Her vivid objects, ranging in scale from palm-sized to torso-sized, reference ancient Chinese folklore and ritual vessels, Buddhist and Taoist temples, and memories of home. Hand-built in terracotta using slabs of rolled clay, her forms are airbrushed in bright underglazes and patterned with handmade stencils, often ornamented with playful charms suspended from nylon zip-ties. Hou’s totemic forms and handheld rattles channel humor and imagination to explore ancestry, identity, and belonging. The rattles, each fitted to the palm and made as part of a daily practice, connect her to ancient pottery traditions where sound was used in ceremony and play. Her surreal sculptures blend memory, dreams, and mythic description, reflecting personal journeys, collective histories, and a deep reverence for the physical world. This marks her first museum exhibition.
Chiara No approaches clay through research into the meaning of storied characters, myths, and symbols and how they shift over time. Since 2021, she has produced a series of stoneware bells known as Idols, modeled after skirt-shaped terracotta figures from ancient Boeotia. Painted in vibrant color and inscribed with glyphs and pictographs, these forms embody mythological beings whose meanings have transformed throughout history. Drawing on extensive archival and etymological research—from medieval folklore and Renaissance prose to Elizabethan grimoires—No uncovers overlooked connections that recast vilified figures. Each bell contains a set of dangling legs that serve as clappers that produce distinctive resonances when activated, resulting in a chorus that celebrates remembrance and resistance.
Together, Hou and No create a dialogue through clay and implied sound. Their works resonate with themes of transformation and cultural inheritance through reimagined storytelling. Their shared attention to material and mythology invites viewers into a space where living, ever-evolving storylines mirror our collective present.
A publication will accompany the exhibition featuring an interview between the artists and curators, installation views, full-color plates, and a checklist.
Chenlu Hou and Chiara No: What the Hands Remember to Hear is organized by Amy Smith-Stewart, Diana Bowes Chief Curator and Caitlin Monachino, Curatorial and Publications Manager.
Born in Shandong, China in 1989, Chenlu Hou is currently based in Providence, RI. She earned her MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019. Since then, she has completed residencies at Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Penland School of Craft, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and Archie Bray Foundation. Her works have been included in exhibitions at Kristen Lorello, New York; YIRI Arts, Taipei City, Taiwan; the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Texas; and the Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT; among other venues. Hou is currently a resident artist at Harvard Ceramics and a Visiting Critic in Ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Chiara No was born in 1981 in Key West, FL, and currently lives and works in Johnson, VT. She studied Art and Theory at the Glasgow School of Art in 2002-03 and received a BA in Art History from Towson University in 2005 and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. She has been on faculty at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an instructor at University of Pennsylvania. She has shown at Spring Break New York, NY; MoCA Westport, Westport, CT; Field Projects and Bible, New York, NY; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; EXILE, Vienna, Austria; Johalla Projects, Chicago, IL; and has participated Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair in both New York and Los Angeles. Her works on paper are included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Special Collection, the Walker Art Center’s Library and Archives, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Library.
