Cindy Zhaoyue Chen

What a Wonderful Dream

My work explores “cuteness” as a constructed surface that can soften, mask, and complicate emotional experience. Using ceramic sculpture, I draw from childhood objects and toy-like forms to create pieces that feel familiar and approachable, but also carry tension, control, and unease.

Through handbuilding, I combine incompatible elements, allowing softness and discomfort to exist at the same time. These forms resist the idea that cuteness is innocent. Instead, they suggest that it can hold pressure, ambiguity, and emotional weight.

My works often function together as environments rather than isolated objects. They invite both attraction and hesitation. I am interested in the moment when something feels almost safe, but not completely. When a surface invites touch, but also creates distance.

By staying between comfort and instability, my work avoids fixed narratives and leaves space for viewers to form their own interpretations.

HUMAN-MADE
2025
Terracotta with glaze, underglaze pencil, stoneware with underglaze and glaze, polyester fur, sand, nail polish
24x24x30"

This work takes the form of a claw-shaped tree stump. Rather than following a specific narrative, I focused on creating visual tension and ambiguity. The shiny metallic surface suggests sharpness, while the tuft of hair could belong to either a person or an animal. The claw itself exists somewhere between creature and plant.

Together, these elements produce what I think of as “cute violence” a collision of softness and threat. I titled the piece Human-Made. The phrase is literal, but it also invites imaginative readings: perhaps a beast has consumed someone, perhaps someone simply cut their hair, or perhaps the form belongs to a world where the boundaries between human, animal, and nature begin to blur. I’m drawn to the work’s openness and its resistance to a single explanation.

RIDE WITH ME PLZ
2025
Stoneware with underglaze and glaze, luster, metal, polyester board, mixed media
24x10x13"

One of the new pieces I made is a red car carrying two ducks. The work is rooted in a childhood memory from growing up in China, when small chicks and ducklings were often sold outside school gates. I remember buying two ducklings with my best friend and playing with them in her toy car at her home during our first-grade years.

In the sculpture, I gave the ducks subtly human-like expressions. This was partly inspired by another recurring memory: the constant presence of secondhand smoke in public spaces. Their slightly uncomfortable faces can be read as reacting to that environment. At the same time, these expressions also reflect my own emotional state this semester. While the piece is deeply personal, it maintains a sense of humor and lightness, allowing memory, discomfort, and playfulness to coexist.

FUZZY CATS
2025
stoneware with underglaze and glaze
4x2x5"

I combined a panda and a cat in a single work. The piece draws from a type of fur-textured painting that stands out vividly in my memory—imagery strongly associated with Chinese visual culture of the 1980s and a sense of deep nostalgia.

The pairing is also intentionally playful. In Chinese, both “panda” and “cat” belong to the category of mao (cat). This linguistic overlap creates a relationship that is both logical and slightly absurd, allowing the work to balance cultural memory with humor.

JUMPING ROPE PIGGY GIRL
2024
stoneware with underglaze and glaze, acrylic rod
14x12x26"

This particular piece is based on a plastic toy I owned when I was about three or four years old. It stands out vividly in my memory because it was an American toy imported to China—yet it was also made in China. Its foreign design felt very different from my other toys, creating a small but memorable "culture shock" for my younger self. Recreating it now allows me to revisit that early, curious moment of cultural discovery.

Unlike the gorilla, this toy was not frightening but strange—an American-made object imported into China, yet ironically also manufactured in China. For a child growing up in China during the early 2000s, American toys carried a sense of mystery and unattainable glamour. This pig toy symbolizes an early "culture shock," highlighting the subtle ways global consumerism weaves into personal histories. In this ceramic reinterpretation, I emphasized the pig's bright colors and simple shape, celebrating the toy's joyful absurdity while also questioning the broader system that commodified childhood wonder.

DAMING THE PINK GORILLA
2024
stoneware with underglaze and glaze
24x24x32'

As a child, this gorilla toy was a source of fear, its exaggerated features and intense color made it both fascinating and terrifying. Revisiting this memory, I reimagined the gorilla in soft pink tones and rounded, whimsical forms. Through coil-building techniques, I constructed the figure slowly, layering clay in a meditative rhythm that allowed me to confront and transform my childhood fear. The finished sculpture embodies a sense of tenderness and understanding, representing a personal journey of confronting early anxieties and finding peace with them.

Pink Gorilla revisits a childhood fear, transforming a once-terrifying toy into a tender and whimsical form through soft color and rounded shapes. The piece reflects a process of emotional reconciliation and healing.

MONCHHICHI TWIN
2025
stoneware, handbuilt, underglaze, glaze

This particular piece is based on a plastic toy I owned when I was about three or four. This work is inspired by the Monchhichi figure that suddenly became popular during my childhood. I wanted to bring a sense of play into the making process, so the form is kept light and flexible. The piece shows a pair of twin dolls, a reflection of my childhood wish to have a twin of my own. Growing up as an only child in China often felt lonely, and this work carries both the comfort of imagination and the quietness of that solitude.

IN DREAM
2025
stoneware, handbuilt, glaze
12x11x18'

The little lamb is a toy that has long existed in my memory. One day, I found her in a thrift store, one figure among many objects. She felt both abandoned by time and quietly cherished, holding warm and gentle memories for children and adults from different generations. I recreated the lamb at a larger scale as a way of expressing my longing for the past and my desire to preserve the tenderness carried by forgotten objects.