This spring, UNC Galleries is excited to welcome ceramics artist Adam Chau to campus. Chau’s work blends traditional craftsmanship with new media technology, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital calligraphy. Over the past year, rapid growth in AI models has sparked much conversation about how new technology will change (or disrupt) the art world.

Chau was quick to see the potential of this new frontier:

“I started to use AI when I realized that it was going to be a highly politicized process—I thought of how ceramics could be a part of the conversation to this new piece of technology.”

Using AI models that draw from large databases of existing images, Chau creates ceramic decals that blend depictions of gay romantic life with historic blue-and-white Chinese pottery. 

“Inspired by alternate fiction (also called counterfactualism), I wondered what the globalized world would have looked like without homophobia and what our objects would look like if it had celebrated gay culture.”

The resulting pieces are both deeply familiar and decidedly uncanny, creating a slippage in our understanding of time and social politics. There is also an ever-present tenderness in Chau’s work, a distinctly human element created through non-human generation. This artistry presents an important counterpoint to many of the fears that currently exist surrounding new media technologies. 

As Chau notes, “sometimes we don’t realize that technology is all around us—from our clothes to light fixtures to the radio and so on—these were all ‘new’ at some point.”

Audiences will have the opportunity to experience Chau’s work firsthand during his solo exhibition, What Almost Was, which will be on view in Oak Room Gallery from Jan. 27 to Mar. 12, 2025. In tandem with the exhibition, Chau will be visiting UNC to conduct a workshop with ceramics students and present a public lecture of his work and research.