Iris
Yirei
hu

I am an artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. I work with my hands to weave, tell stories, transform, dye, and compost my lived reality. Painting, weaving, natural indigo dyeing, collecting earthly specimens, and working with soil and fibers are ways to redeem the embodied intimacy we once had with the natural world. I make colorful, haptic, and large assemblages, which are a culmination of networks that reverberate through time and space in both tangible and cosmic ways. In a single assemblage, one may encounter materials, stories, living organisms, and ecologies from Taiwan, California, Southern China, Mexico, and the American Southwest. As someone who is interested in how people, places, and plants are interconnected through colonialism, my work allows me to form connections with artists, scientists, historians, keepers of traditions, and community stakeholders and organizers. I center learning in these relationships and through them, hope to collaboratively shape futures and friendships.

I see art as a translation process. My artwork mirrors the process of deepening a relationship with a friend, an elder, an activist, a practice, a lover, a plant, or someone I’ve lost. I am interested in the stories that enable my story to be told, and I approach my life and art making by giving form to these relationships while honoring the ripples and changes that come. This way of working allows me to resist the ways that art is typically produced and consumed, and move away from the artist as creative genius and into the realm of creative advocate. I think of art as my gift. How can I use my art to support others on their journey or uplift the work of others so that we can deepen our relationship to what we experience and with whom we connect?

I also study craft practices because I see craft as a technology that knows deep time. For instance, through apprenticeship and learning, I explore how weaving continues to deepen my interdependence with and understanding of the natural world. Weaving is a cosmological practice that depends on the land (i.e. plants for dye and sheep for wool), as well as a set of lineages and relations (i.e. matrilineal relationships and the number of people involved in making a single weaving). Not only is the weaver’s history embedded into each tapestry, but the fibers involved also carry the weight of history and fraught transformation that colonization and occupation have brought upon. When I work with fibers, paint, or soil, I feel closest to the soul of the earth. My work and I together form a node within these infinite connections of brilliance. Through practice, I’ve arrived at the questions that drive my work: how does craft and art bridge presumed gaps between seemingly disparate things, and also help us understand one another through material and social histories? What possibilities does learning with intention and humility have?

iris yirei hu (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who has shown her work at the Plug-in ICA (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), OxyArts at Occidental College, John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Women's Center for Creative Work, Human Resources, Lenfest Center for the Arts (New York, NY), and Visitor Welcome Center. Public art commissions include mural wraps at California State University Dominguez Hills (2020) and bus and rail posters for LA Metro (2016). She has held residencies at the Women's Center for Creative Work (2018), Carrizozo AIR (2020), and is currently in residence at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI) through 2021. She has been supported by the Foundation of Contemporary Art, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Engagement Grant, and is a 2016 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. Her work has been reviewed and featured in the LA Times, Artforum, Carla, CNN, Sinovision, KCET, X-TRA Online, and Artillery. She is working on her first book, and is currently teaching Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design. She earned her BA from UCLA and MFA from Columbia University in the City of New York.

Projects with Candor Arts:

sashiko