Han Chai was born in Jixi, a distant industrial metropolis on China’s northern border, a area formed by excessive local weather, heavy business, and layered histories of migration. Rising up in an setting marked by financial volatility and working-class labour, she developed an early consciousness of how shortly stability and social visibility can shift. As an adolescent she recognized with the Shamate youth subculture, a group of younger migrant employees who used self-styling, on-line identities, and shared visible codes to claim presence inside methods that largely missed them. This proximity to lives lived on the margins continues to tell the emotional and political floor of her work.
She later moved to the UK to review, the place her pursuits step by step prolonged towards construction, materials behaviour, and narrative type. What started as garment-based considering step by step adopted a sculptural logic, prompting a transition into tremendous artwork. This shift allowed her to attach private expertise with broader questions of labour, class, and cultural worth, establishing the conceptual framework that continues to information her follow.
An early consolidation of this course emerged with Smooth Monuments (2023) at aolab Experimental Gallery in Shanghai and Uncommon Norm (2024) in Hangzhou. On this physique of labor, Chai compelled material and pliable textiles into upright, gravity-resisting constructions, treating smooth matter as a spatial and mnemonic agent reasonably than passive cloth. By layering, inner rigidity, and managed staging, the sculptures positioned softness as able to carrying weight and length whereas retaining a way of bodily presence. The exhibition additionally marked the clear articulation of what she describes as “reversed craftsmanship,” the place care, time, and materials sensitivity function as crucial selections reasonably than ornamental results.
From 2025 onward, this materials investigation expanded by way of the event of Royal Screw, translating earlier issues right into a extra traditionally and materially charged sculptural language. Working more and more with jade, bone, and bamboo, Chai redirected supplies historically related to authority and permanence towards the visible tradition of Shamate youth. The solo presentation on the Casoria Modern Artwork Museum in Naples in October 2025 marked an essential institutional second, the place works together with Jade ID, 0.88 Yuan, The Low cost Factor, and Cellphone Grave positioned marginal digital identities inside the visible logic of the museum.
Exhibitions throughout London and Italy between late 2025 and early 2026 have prolonged the attain of this physique of labor whereas sustaining the measured, materially disciplined strategy that defines Chai’s follow. Throughout these shows, her sculptures proceed to function as quiet acts of revaluation, utilizing traditionally charged supplies to carry the presence of lives and subcultures usually positioned on the margins of official report. Quite than treating these works as static memorials, Chai approaches sculpture as an ongoing means of cultural marking, one which traces how id, labour, and reminiscence are carried ahead by way of materials type. She presently lives and works in London, the place her follow continues to develop.
