Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale 2026

Birender Kumar Yadav is an Indian artist who explores the relationship between workers’ lives and materials such as clay. The son of a blacksmith who worked in a coal mine, Yadav has long focused on migrant and seasonal workers at the brick kilns of Mirzapur, India. These workers move with the seasons, enduring the intense heat of the kilns and precarious working conditions.

Yadav pays particular attention to their fingertips. While ceramic work begins with the sensitive touch of the fingers, brick workers handle rough clay, sand, and bricks every day, sometimes wearing away even their fingerprints.

After Shift is an installation that recreates traditional Korean hanok construction tools and mining tools from India in ceramic. Take a moment to look at the tools arranged on the wooden boards. The scene is inspired by the moment when workers put away their tools at the end of the day. Up close, tools normally made of metal or wood have been transformed into fragile ceramic objects, their surfaces preserving the wear and textures of the original tools.

Yadav created the work with students from Korea Ceramic Art High School, connecting memories of labor in India and Korea and bringing the touch and time of different generations into a single work. As you look at these tools remade in ceramic, consider how traces of human touch and time remain in tools and spaces even after the day’s work has ended.