Future Artifacts by Kristiana Chan

Sculpture March 7 2025

Intro

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

From the Artist

“Drawing inspiration from aquatic life forms and marine life ancestors, this series imagines the relics and remnants of alternative timelines of migration and labor, speculating on a mythologized civilization holding reverence for their aquatic ancestry.

These pieces imagine a divergent lineage of ancestors were free to write their own destinies as if colonial powers hadn’t invaded and intervened.

Photographed in the waters of Aptos Creek (site of 1800s Chinese settlement, referred to as Arroyo del Chino) and in the fossilized tide pools of New Brighton Beach, formerly known as China Beach until 1933.

These sites served as Chinese settlements that housed railroad, farming, and fishing laborers in Santa Cruz during the 1870s and 1880s, at the height of anti-Chinese sentiment in California that eventually led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.”

Interpretation

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?

……

In 2023, the tide carried them ashore—mysterious ceramic objects appearing on China Beach, Santa Cruz.

They resemble vessels, yet they could be ritual artifacts. Their function is obscured, as if they are the remnants of a history that never took place.

Look closely—their curves echo the contours of the human body, yet they also follow the undulating forms of marine creatures. The circular structures on their surfaces resemble earrings, symbols of adornment, belonging, or identity, while also suggesting the cyclical nature of time, life, and memory. The rough indentations—were they shaped by the calloused hands of laborers, or do they mimic the scales of the oceanic beings they revered? Their mottled surfaces—do they bear the sediment of history, or were they given their strange luster by seawater, storms, and time itself?

No one knows.

Full interpretation available at the bottom of the page.