FAMILY DINNER

Carts stacked with glinting silver steamers bustle through the clamor of a Hong Kong dim sum hall. Aromas of shrimp dumplings and char siu bao cling to the rising steam as servers call out names of dishes in a flurry of Cantonese. Elders hold court at round banquet tables, their chopsticks darting between teacups and translucent rice crepes. A monumental lazy susan spins slowly, a constellation of dishes orbiting a nucleus of shared inheritance. In this communion of tastes and tongues, family is felt in the gestures—pouring tea, splitting buns, trading stories. This is not simply a meal; it’s an enactment of lineage, a choreography of belonging. This is the scene—sensorial and ancestral—that undergirds Vivian Chiu’s Family Dinner.

Extending her reverent transformation of historic shipping crates inherited from the fifth-generation owner of Wing On Wo & Co.—the oldest storefront in Manhattan’s Chinatown—Chiu meticulously dismantles, facets, and coffers their weathered, stamped pine slats into undulating vessel forms that echo the porcelain wares they once ferried across oceans. Family Dinner advances this work, pushing the artist’s technical virtuosity and personal storytelling to new, imperial heights. Her kinetic, interlocking, and conjoined sculptures pay homage to the most technically challenging porcelain innovations of 18th-century Jingdezhen, developed under the demanding aesthetic direction of the Qianlong emperor and the technical prowess of kilnmaster Tang Ying. In Chiu’s hands, this rarefied ceramic lineage is re-vivified in wood, infused not with imperial decree but personal kinship. Her vessels share bodies and make cycles of return that channel diasporic longing and familial bond. 

At the center of the exhibition is Family Dinner, a monumental ring of twenty-four conjoined bowls filled with white rice flowing from one to the next—a continuous current of sustenance and connection. Elevated on a round pedestal, this extended family portrait recalls gathering around a dim sum banquet table. One can almost feel the gravitational pull of Popo, Chiu’s grandmother, the family’s matriarch, and the anchor of this orbit of work. This sculpture moves from representing family to performing it. Here the vessels do not merely contain: they commune. 

In works like Triple Conjoined Vase (Group Photo) and Double Conjoined Vase (Here and There), Chiu reimagines one of Qing Dynasty porcelain’s most technically ambitious forms—the multi-necked vase—as sculptural portraits of kinship. These conjoined vessels lean toward each other like siblings in a family snapshot: bonded through a shared body, yet individuated, each spout angling outward. They become meditations on intimacy and autonomy, reflecting Chiu’s own position—deeply connected to her family and heritage in Hong Kong while forging a queer, independent life in the U.S.

Her rotating cratewood vessels—meticulously inlaid with marquetry depicting cargo ships, airplanes, and dim sum dishes—are aptly mounted onto lazy susan hardware. The works draw inspiration from rotating vases zhuanxin ping, feats of ceramic engineering that were prized for their ingenuity. With reticulated exteriors and revolving inner cylinders, they were the tour de force of the imperial kilns. Each required multiple firings, exacting assembly, and were intended to mesmerize—functioning like porcelain zoetropes that animated bats in flight or koi languidly gliding through water as they spun. 

Chiu infuses this imperial innovation with personal narrative. One kinetic double-gourd vase features a Cathay Pacific jet soaring through stylized clouds—an homage to her grandmother’s legacy as one of the airline’s first ground crew and to Chiu’s own diasporic crossings. Another animates a container ship cresting Ming-style waves, a nod to the tides of global trade and migration that carried the crates she now transforms. A third scrolls through trompe l’oeil marquetry of dim sum staples—shumai, har gow, chicken feet—rendered in wood veneer like an inlaid menu.

Like a glutinous dumpling wrapper cradling a savory filling, Chiu’s interconnected vessels contain centuries of cross-cultural and inter-generational exchange—masterfully crafted, catalyzed, shared, and savored. Her work draws on the legacies of Chinese porcelain and dim sum, both born of global encounter and refined through material innovation. For centuries, porcelain was the primary material vehicle to transmit information, trade, and iterate at a global scale. Dim sum similarly emerged from a period of robust global exchange—originating during the Silk Road in teahouses for nomadic traders and later taking hold in Hong Kong as a cherished gastronomic art form and ritual. Chiu continues this cycle of return, metabolizing culture as porcelain and dim sum once did, devouring and re-presenting her own material inheritances and expressing the eternal appetite for home across time and terrain. 

Exhibition essay by Sarah Darro

Curator and Exhibitions Director

Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.