Bio

Nanxi Jin (She/Her) is originally from Jingdezhen, China. She is currently based in Chicago. She is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who specializes in ceramic media.

Nanxi obtained a BFA in Art & Design from Alfred University in 2020. She graduated from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. Nanxi’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at NYCxDesign (New York), Women’s Made Gallery (Chicago), SOIL (Seattle), and Paris Design Week (France). She received residency fellowships, including the Ox-Bow School of Art, the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the Anderson Ranch Arts Center Fellowship. Her work “Various Vases” has been collected by the Guangdong Shiwan Ceramic Museum in China.

Artist Statement

I work with clay as both a material and a language. Every glaze formula, firing cycle, and surface variation carries accumulated knowledge shaped by touch, time, and repetition. My practice is grounded in sustained attention to process, where material records are treated not as byproducts, but as central carriers of meaning.

Working across hand-building, hand-pressing, slip-casting, and throwing, I create objects that emerge through fragmentation, reconstruction, and reuse. Discarded porcelain shards, glaze drips, and celadon remnants are reassembled into new forms, allowing traces of previous use, failure, and firing to remain visible. These materials function as evidence of labor, erosion, and transformation, challenging conventional notions of authorship, value, and permanence in ceramics. Through high-fired processes, repetition, and subtle variation, small shifts in glaze thickness or firing atmosphere become makers of time and embodied memory.

My practice is shaped by my experience of living and working between China and the United States for over a decade. Rather than positioning tradition and experimentation as opposites, my work treats them as interdependent forces. The resulting works often sit between categories—jewelry and object, functional ware and sculpture, craft and design—allowing ceramics to operate as a site of cultural translation. Through this approach, my work explores how objects can carry both personal and collective histories while remaining open to reinvention. Clay, for me, is a medium that remembers, resists closure, and continually rearticulates relationships between past, present, and future.