Artist Lens | Heidi Lau: Touch, Memory, and Clay

A self-taught sculptor, Heidi Lau treats her chosen medium as a collaborator. Clay, she notes, enforces a slow pace; every press, redo, and pinch becomes a chronicleis a record of her decisions and hesitations. What appears might read as texture on the material’s surface is also a record ledger of time, capturing the artist’s every touch. Hands recur throughout Lau’s work. They may seem to offer, to grasp, or even to pull themselves apart. For Lau, they are both subject and metaphor, invoking the labour of making and the layered meanings of touch. Though she avoids moulds, her hand forms can echo them, appearing as repeated shapes that suggest replication and a tension between the mechanical and the handmade. Lau’s presentation for Sigg Prize 2025 marks her first use of robotics. Clay remains central, now sharing space with calibrated movement. From this pairing, alongside a life between Macau and New York, Lau builds a world that accommodates what she calls a ‘double estrangement,’ navigating the tension between belonging and separation, craft and mechanism, where her creatures inhabit the in‑between, creating a sanctuary where the past and the future can rest together. English, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese closed captions are available in the player. M+ is Asia’s global museum of contemporary visual culture in Hong Kong. Subscribe to our channel: https://mplus.org/subscribe Sign up to the M+ Newsletter: https://mplus.org/en-newsletter M+ Magazine for more visual culture: https://mplus.org.hk/magazine Instagram:   / mplusmuseum   M+ Shop: https://shop.mplus.org.hk Website: https://mplus.org.hk