Artist Chenlu Hou Tells Stories Through Sculpture

Photo come from Adam Smith

When Chenlu Hou says her colorful, quirky and often wildly decorated clay sculptures are inspired by Chinese folk art and cut paper, it’s at first hard to believe.

But then she sits down at her studio in Allston, scissors in hand, and it all makes sense. Hou cuts out a design she drew earlier on a white sheet of paper and pulls it open. The pattern appears. And you can instantly see how her elaborate works began.

“It usually starts with paper or a digital sketch,” she says. “I also use cut paper as a stencil when painting,” says Hou, who also goes by LuLu.

Hou, a Rhode Island resident, is an artist in residence at the Office for the Arts at Harvard for the 2025 to 2026 school year. She also teaches part time at the Rhode Island School of Design and she plays ukulele bass and sings in DakouDakou, a musical collective that mixes Chinese folk songs and 1960s garage-pop.

Born and raised in Shandong, China, Hou says she grew up surrounded by art, picking up pen and paper at a young age. Her parents, she says, worked at a flour mill when she was a kid, but they always loved arts and crafts.

“My father is a self-taught painter, who practices traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, and my mother loves knitting. I grew up surrounded by handmade things, learning from them the beauty of patience, rhythm, and care. I was always fascinated by how something ordinary could turn magical through touch.”

But, Hou said, she wasn’t always in love with terracotta sculpture.

“I used to have a love–hate relationship with clay, but over time we made peace. Clay remembers everything — it holds both memory and transformation, recording every touch, every accident. I’m drawn to that honesty. I also love the labor-intensive process of ceramics; the physical effort feels grounding, almost meditative, like breathing in sync with the material.”

Behind her studio’s desk on a recent fall day stood one of her sculptures. The work, painted mostly in muted yellows, greens and pinks, appears almost like a cactus, with two peachy faces overgrown with rope-like hair at the top. A flower is in between the two figures.

When asked the title of the work, Hou almost appears to blush as she explains the name is very long: “Two Vegetarian Snakes Are Sucking Nectar Through Retractable Straws” (see photo above). In a social media post displaying the creation of the work, Hou explains that the sculpture started as a digital sketch and a “strange little joke: What does a vegetarian snake eat? If it’s nectar, how do they get it? That kind of absurd curiosity often leads me into new work — especially in the space between Chinese and English, where mistranslations, confusion, and humor spark unexpected ideas.”

“The result is a tension I love: between the permanence of fired clay and the ephemeral, shifting nature of memory, language, and cultural narrative.”

The artist says she sees her sculptures as “visual stories, half celebration, half reflection. I think of my practice as a space where those two influences meet."

Folk art, she says, provides a playful and direct visual language, while her daily experiences provide the story.

“It’s about translating small moments of adaptation, displacement, and celebration into something tactile and imaginative. I’m drawn to the tension between the playful and the unsettling, between color and complexity.”

Hou says when she moved to the U.S. her ability to express herself through art underwent a transformation.

While in China, she says, folk stories captured and shaped her imagination. She would experiment with techniques and considered herself still an amateur.

But that changed while in the U.S. in her 30s: She was far from family, friends and the familiar. And, within a couple years, was in the middle of Covid-19 pandemic in a new land.

“Here, I began to turn inward — reflecting on my own story, what it means to move, to adapt, to translate. Living between languages and cultures gave me a more complex voice. I started combining traditional imagery with contemporary emotions, often mixing humor and uncertainty. My work became less about making something beautiful and more about asking questions through materials.”

Throughout the lonely period of the pandemic, she said, she would go for walks, especially at dusk, and notice neighborhood cats perched by windows, looking out as the sun was setting.

“Over time, I began mapping their homes and giving them names — Lola, Jonsie, David, Miguel, and more. Those small encounters became a quiet source of comfort,” she says. “The natural light is still soft and sufficient, and with only a thin screen between us, the cats sometimes try to sniff at the stranger standing outside their window. This small, everyday ritual helped me become familiar with the rhythm of my neighborhood — the flow of the streets, the changing seasons, the shifting light. The Victorian houses of New England felt so different from the tall concrete apartment buildings where I grew up in China. These walks grounded me, giving me a tangible sense of connection and presence in a time of isolation.”

Those walks and evening observations, she says, inspired her work, “You Should Scream When You Encounter a Window Cat.”

She says the work, which includes a cat with the faces of four people above it, captures “the fleeting emotions of passersby.”

Developing her current style of works, she says, took time. While at RISD as a student, Hou says, she experimented a great deal. She would mix ceramics, objects she found and even video.

“I was curious about how different materials could speak to each other,” the artist explains. But in time, she says, she started focusing less on “characters” that told stories and more on the objects themselves as storytellers.

She went on to earn her Masters in Fine Arts in ceramics from RISD in 2019 and also completed residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design, Penland School of Craft, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and at the Archie Bray Foundation.

“My current style, combining hand-built forms with airbrushed underglaze, found materials, and sometimes video, feels like a natural merging of my background in craft and my curiosity about moving images.”