Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale 2026

Renée So is self-taught in ceramics and sees clay as a material connected to some 30,000 years of human creativity. Born in Hong Kong, she moved to Australia before settling in London. Drawing on her own experience of migration and UNESCO’s Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects, So explores how objects move across time and place, change hands, and are sometimes looted.

Fragrant History enlarges the forms of snuff bottles and perfume bottles in clay. Snuff bottles are small vessels once used to hold powdered tobacco that was inhaled through the nose. In China, they developed into finely crafted objects and prized collectibles at the imperial court and among the upper classes. The word “Fragrant” in the title refers not only to perfume, but also to So’s birthplace, Hong Kong, whose name means “Fragrant Harbor.”

Pay attention to the names on the bottles. “Opium” evokes both the drug and the history of the Opium Wars, while “Colony” suggests colonialism and imperialism. “Royal Pekingese” refers to Looty, a Pekingese taken to Britain and presented to Queen Victoria after British and French forces looted Yuanmingyuan, the Qing imperial garden complex, in 1860. Behind these alluring perfume bottles and their names lie histories of colonialism, war, and looting.

Enlarged far beyond their original scale, the familiar curves of perfume bottles become unfamiliar sculptural forms. Look at the alluring shapes of the bottles alongside the histories carried in their names. So brings the desire to own and collect beautiful objects into tension with the histories of movement and looting that lie behind them.