Made in Santa Cruz, Future Artifacts uses ceramics as a medium, yet it does not rely on fractured forms, nor does it employ humor or defiance. The ceramic pieces in this work retain the fundamental shape of vessels but extend beyond their conventional function. Through experimentation, they explore new possibilities and pose a question: If history had taken a different course, how would the civilization embodied in these artifacts have endured? Kristiana 莊礼恩 Chan employs ceramics as a medium to reimagine history, expanding the experimental nature of the work into speculations on time, history, and memory.

Future Artifacts engages with a forgotten yet enduring history through physical material. At the same time, the site in which the work is situated bears a heavy past and remains inseparable from the piece itself. Santa Cruz was once home to a thriving Chinese labor community, where workers built railroads, farmed, and fished along the coast. However, in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act came into effect, forcing Chinese laborers from the land. In 1933, China Beach was renamed New Brighton Beach. This renaming reshaped the history of the land—original stories were folded into the official narrative, and the memory of the shoreline remains fragmented.

Kristiana 莊礼恩 Chan chose New Brighton Beach as the site for Future Artifacts, bringing the folded layers of history back into view and transforming physical material into site-specific art. In this environment, Future Artifacts is no longer just ceramics—it becomes installation, heritage, and an engagement with history. It moves between archaeology and speculative fiction, actively constructing a historical fragment. Real history leaves a rupture here, but Future Artifacts exists more like an alternative reality—unbroken, yet forgotten.

Are they artifacts of archaeology, or fragments of the future?

Are they remnants of a forgotten history, or echoes of a future that has yet to arrive?

If migrating ancestors had not been displaced, if colonial intervention had never occurred, would they have built their own systems of belief? If they had been free to write their own destinies, would their cultural heritage have taken a different form?