Heidi Lau: Ouroboros — Heidi Lau

Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is pleased to present Ouroboros, an installation of ceramic sculptural work by artist Heidi Lau. On view from October 30 through December 19, 2026, Ouroboros expands upon Pavilion Procession, a major installation by Lau shown in the Sigg Prize 2025 Exhibition at M+ in Hong Kong. A public opening will be held on Friday, October 30, from 6-8pm. The artist will be present.

The title of the exhibition, Ouroboros, refers to an ancient totem of a snake or dragon in a circular formation swallowing its own tail. Interpreted as a reference to the cyclical nature of life, death and rebirth, for Lau it also points to a blurred distinction between phenomena and beings.

Through hand-built, textured ceramics, Heidi Lau creates ritual objects, funerary monuments, fossilized creatures, and miniature universes. Since 2021, Lau has been immersed in the zoomorphic imaginings of Shanhaijing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas), a text compiling hundreds of geographies and fantastical creatures dated as early as fourth century BCE. The source mythologies of these cross-pollinated species, transmutable beings, and androgynous beasts inform Lau’s sculptural conceptions of a cosmic space, interweaving anti-colonial, anti-categorical, non-linear thinking with personal histories and narratives.

Presented in the main gallery space is Within These Very Mountains (2026), the largest ceramic installation Lau has made since she began experimenting with the suspended form in 2021 as the inaugural artist in residence at Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The elements and colors of this multi-part, immersive work came to Lau in a recurring dream – a floating landscape rendered in clay. Glazed in celadon greens, pastel pinks, and celestial blues, these craggy, bodily vessels evoke grottoes, scholar’s rocks, and stalactites. For Lau, the depiction of a landscape (shanshui) not only expresses dimensions of the self, but is also a host for historical discourse with the past. Lau’s composite terrain implies a connection between the corporeal and earthly, the mythical and sublime.

In Kinetic Being (A Walk Around the Sandstone Pavilions), 2025, Lau incorporates a technological element in her work for the first time. As a continuation of her research into the Shanhaijing text, Lau has created her own mytho-robotic creature: a ceramic, kinetic spider which meanders around a hand-built landscape. Part organic and part machine, Lau’s spider is twitchy and sporadic in its movement, and speaks to the paradoxical nature of Lau’s work.

The works in Ouroboros defy categorization and exist in a perpetual, contradictory state of productive/anti-productive, ancient/futuristic, made/unmade, and even beautiful/grotesque. These dichotomies underscore an irrationality central to Lau’s practice and work.

Heidi Lau (born 1987) grew up in Macau and lives and works in New York. Selected solo and two person exhibitions include Chrysalis Spectre, with Leelee Chan, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2024); A Cacophony of Rocks, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2024); Shadow Speak, with Biraaj Dodiya, Bureau, New York (2023); Gardens as Cosmic Terrains, Green-Wood Cemetery, New York (2022); Spirit Vessels, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); The Primordial Molder, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2017); and The Obscure Region II, Macau Art Museum, Macau (2014), among others. In 2019, Lau presented Apparition for the Macau-China Collateral Exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Recent group exhibitions include Sigg Prize 2025 Exhibition at M+ Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2025); The Jealous Potter at UCCA Clay, Yixing (2025); Shanshui: Echoes and Signals at M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2024); Cosmos Cinema: The 14th Shanghai Biennale at Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2023); and Liquid Ground at UCCA, Beijing (2022) and Para Site, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong (2021), among others.

In 2026, Lau was one of two recipients of the Sigg Prize 2025 by M+ Museum of Visual Culture in Hong Kong.

Lau’s work is included in the collections of The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York; Kadist Art Foundation; the M+ Museum in Hong Kong; Macau Museum of Art, Macau; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; New York Historical, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, among others.