jan.cj.hu@gmail.com
I’m a Chinese American artist based in San Francisco, shaped by time in North Carolina and Colorado. I work with analog media and craft, drawn to slow, tactile processes and the quiet ways materials hold memory. With a background in science and environmentalism, I approach making as both observation and relationship, paying attention to how materials transform, interact, and connect us to the natural world.
I make work in response to the extractive systems of colonialism and western capitalism that have distanced us from material and land. Through my practice, I create small rituals of care that reconnect us to nature as kin. Often, I try to freeze objects and moments in time, much like photography, which I first began experimenting with as a young child . Memorializing fleeting experiences within an ever-shifting environment allows me to preserve awe onto what might otherwise pass unnoticed.
My process is guided by curiosity, repetition, and close attention, alongside research rooted in social and cultural contexts, particularly within the Chinese American diaspora. In the studio, this takes shape through hands-on cycles of testing, building, and reworking materials, often returning to the same forms and processes to observe how they shift over time. I move between structured experimentation and intuitive decision-making, where scientific observation of material behavior sits alongside sensory, embodied responses. Rather than separating thinking and making, I let them inform each other directly through the act of working. My work emerges through this ongoing dialogue with material, existing in the overlap of folk craft, deep ecology, and a quiet sense of the magical embedded in everyday occurences and processes.
San Francisco, California 2026