Yoyo Hu is a Chinese-born sculptor and installation artist whose practice bridges ancient craftsmanship with emerging technologies such as 3D modeling, 3D printing, slip casting, and ceramic light-based installation. Her works construct a unique visual language that oscillates between “future relics” and “archaeologies of tomorrow,” questioning what traces of human existence will endure as technology reshapes our world at unprecedented speed.
Central to Hu’s artistic inquiry are the tensions between permanence and impermanence, tradition and innovation, memory and temporality. Her early work focused on figurative sculpture inspired by Chinese historical art and cultural narratives. Over time, she transitioned from representational forms to large-scale sculptural installations. Yet, the characters and symbolic imagery from her early practice continue to inhabit her new works in transformed ways. They live on as fragments, shadows, and metaphoric presences embedded within architectural, ceramic, and light-based structures.
Her work reflects profound meditations on homesickness, cultural identity, the search for meaning, and the erosion and reconstruction of memory. By merging the tactile history of ceramics with the precision of digital technologies, Hu creates immersive environments that invite viewers to contemplate humanity’s dialogue with time—its past, its future, and the uncertain terrain shaped by artificial intelligence and rapid technological evolution.
Hu’s installations often present themselves as poetic ruins or monuments of an imagined era, prompting viewers to consider a key question: When our present becomes the past, what will remain? And what does it mean to be human in a future defined by machines, data, and accelerating change?
My practice explores the shifting boundaries between permanence and disappearance, the handmade and the digital, the ancient and the speculative future. Trained in traditional sculptural ceramics yet deeply engaged with contemporary technologies, I build a language that merges clay, 3D modeling, casting, light, and architectural-scale installations. These hybrid forms allow me to examine what it means to be human in an era shaped by artificial intelligence, accelerated innovation, and rapidly transforming cultural memory.
Working with clay—a material whose history stretches across civilizations—grounds me in the physicality of touch, time, and labor. At the same time, digital processes enable me to fragment, distort, or reconfigure the human form, turning bodies into data, impressions, and evolving artifacts. Many of my works begin as virtual constructs before undergoing a long process of molding, firing, and reassembly, echoing how contemporary identities are first imagined, then materialized, and finally fossilized by the systems that shape us.
I am interested in the traces we leave behind: gestures, memories, failures of technology, and emotional residues. In Future Relics, I imagine the present as future archaeology—what might be excavated from the ruins of our hyper-digital age? What parts of us will survive when technology advances faster than our ability to comprehend its consequences?
My sculptures do not offer answers. Instead, they inhabit the tension between fragility and monumentality, between personal memory and collective evolution. I create to ask: When the world accelerates beyond the human, what remains undeniably human?