Born in Hong Kong, Viv grew up in a place rich in the dualities of East and West, where dense urban life meets hilly subtropical forests surrounded by the sea. As a diasporic artist-maker based in Scotland, her work explores the experience of existing between worlds and the ongoing journey back to the embodied self and nature. For Viv, clay is a language of return—a living material that listens, reflects, and remembers.
Influenced by animist mythologies and ancient artefacts, Viv hand-builds vessels and objects as wayfinders toward a personal mythology. Each piece carries its own quiet story—a thread connecting the artist to ancestral memory, place, and the deeper rhythms of life.
Working with self-foraged wild clay from the Scottish landscape has deepened Viv’s relationship to place and to the living Earth. She shares: “In the last few years, exploring and getting to know the landscape of Scotland has nurtured greater feelings of connection and belonging to my chosen homeland, and a desire to reflect these ideas in my work. Utilising self-gathered native materials is a move towards developing a more deeply rooted connection to place and a means of exploring my identity as a Chinese-Scottish maker and as a human being.”
Her work functions as both ritual and reclamation—a slow return to authenticity, belonging, and the understanding that humanity is not separate from nature, but part of it.
Viv graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2017 with a first class honours in Sculpture and has exhibited at St Andrews Museum, The Scottish Gallery, and The New Craftsmen in London.
What value does craft have in daily life?
Craft is a vital means by which we continue to tell the stories, skills and culture of the people and the land we live on through the objects in our daily life. It provides us with a richer and more meaningful engagement to these objects as well as a greater appreciation for the value of earth’s resources that sustain not just the making of the objects but all of life itself.
What does Scottishness mean to you?
It comes from my experience of being in the wild Scottish landscape - elemental, honest, primal beauty.
Come and visit us at Bard in Leith to see Viv’s work, or get in touch with us directly.
