An occasional look at Connecticut’s remarkable people, places and things Adam Chau makes tangible what once seemed impossible, reimagining an ancient art form by pairing it with digital technology to depict — and celebrate — queer subjects. Chau brings these subjects to life through cer amics, working with his hands, machines and, lately, artificial intelligence. To Chau, the technology is one of many artist’s tools that assists him in rendering images of people and histories that couldn’t otherwise exist. “I want to work with technology, not against it,” Chau said. “Most of my work, there’s a little bit of hand. There’s a little bit of machine.” Chau, who is Asian American and queer, is known for blending traditional blue-and-white porcelain with digital technology. Last year, Chau joined the Hartford Art School, at the University of Hartford, as the Edith Dale Monson Gallery director and curator. He manages the on-campus art program, and he’s responsible for maintaining the school’s art collection, coordinating art loans and presenting works by emerging mid-career and established artists throughout the U.S. Chau’s interest in ceramics came about organically. Born in Stamford and raised in Greenwich, Chau spent years learning the act of molding, baking and decorating in his family’s bakery. Those early lessons in shaping raw materials would soon follow him into his ceramics career.  He first earned his BFA in studio ceramics from the Maine College of Art Design and later a master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he took courses in digital manufacturing and learned to use tools such as 3-D printers and lasers.  The combination of handwork and machinery has since become central to Chau’s artistic practice, which is simultaneously traditional and contemporary. While crafted from clay, using skills developed by humans thousands of years ago, Chau’s pieces convey a modern awareness of a world in which digital technology is woven into every aspect of day-to-day life. In “MESSENGER: a 21st Century Love Letter,” Chau used ceramics to craft a cellphone, which he inscribed with intimate messages to his husband, who was his long distance boyfriend at the time. The series was debuted in 2021 at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis. “MESSENGER: a 21st Century Love Letter” by Adam Chau featured porcelain tiles in the shape of smartphones with messages exchanged with his future husband after they met in Italy. Credit: Courtesy of Adam Chau Art in the AI age Ten years ago, Chau was wondering what his child might look like if he and his husband could conceive. Chau tried to answer the question with the technology available to him at the time, but eventually set the idea aside. The results couldn’t capture what he envisioned. Then, about three years ago, a fellow artist inspired him to try AI. Chau was interviewing Canadian ceramics artist Carole Epp on his podcast, Trade Secret. Epp was using AI in her work — which helped her find a new way to make art while she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. “It allowed me to still feel like I was being creative and sort of processing what I was actually going through at the time,” Epp said.  For Epp, AI has almost become nearly inseparable from everyday life, much like the internet did years ago, she said. And she thought artists shouldn’t shy away from it. “You can’t tell artists not to use a language or a technology that is being used all over the world,” she said in an interview with The Connecticut Mirror. “We want to play around with it too, and we want to figure out the boundaries of it, how it can be incorporated in different ways, and how it can be used positively.” Epp’s experience inspired Chau. His first series of work using AI, “Generated Love,” explored an alternate ancient history — one in which queer love was celebrated. Using an AI image generator called Midjourney, Chau created romantic images set during the Ming Dynasty, featuring men in traditional attire embracing and kissing. The images were then integrated into plates that resemble the kind of ancient artifacts one might see in a museum — but depicting people and lives that weren’t commonly portrayed at the time. Credit: Courtesy of Adam Chau Credit: Courtesy of Adam Chau “Generated Love” by Adam Chau rendered in a blue-and-white Ming Dynasty porcelain style. The series reimagines a counterfactual history celebrating gay romance. Chau’s artistic endeavors, bringing together ancient and modern, go beyond the pieces he crafts. Throughout his career, Chau has worked with several art organizations including Hudson Valley MOCA, ArtsWestchester, and Clay Art Center. He has also curated more than 20 exhibitions and has given lectures across the country and around the world about the relationship between the traditional craftsmanship of ceramics and digital technology.  Chau’s work has also earned him international recognition. In 2018, he received the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Emerging Artist Fellowship and since 2019, has been a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, a UNESCO partner organization.    Since joining the Hartford Art School, Chau has produced six exhibitions. He is now curating a yearlong exhibition for the art school’s 150th anniversary next year.  Hand and machine One element remains consistent across Chau’s work: a blue-and-white palette rooted in the centuries-old history of Asian ceramics and his own Asian heritage.  “AI afforded me the ability to make the images look old,” Chau said. “I can paint fairly well on ceramics but AI allowed me to have a different characteristic of the image.” In 2024, “Generated Love” was shown in “Flights of Fiction,” an exhibition Chau curated at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives, one of the largest LGBTQ+ museums in the United States. Chau was the first Asian artist featured at the museum.   As part of the exhibition, Chau chose to include works by Howard Kottler, a gay artist from the 1960s who was among the artists to begin putting images on plates. Chau wanted to honor the mentor he has never met, but whose works have also greatly influenced his own.   When Robert Kesten, president of the museum, first saw one of Chau’s plates on a postcard, he said he was immediately struck by Chau’s creativity and intelligence.  “He uniquely pulls together history, culture, and when I say history and culture, I mean we’re going back maybe a thousand years, maybe more than a thousand years, to Asian pottery and design all the way and then bringing it from a classic tradition in the Asian mindset to an LGBT mindset in the 21st century,” Kesten said.  After “Generated Love,” Chau returned to the question he’d wondered about years earlier, envisioning a child he and his husband might conceive. He now had a tool to explore that vision. Chau blended childhood pictures of himself and his husband, using Midjourney, and the result was Billie, a fictional son born from Chau’s imagination.  Chau then brought Billie into the physical world, hiring a designer to create a 3-D model. After printing the model, Chau turned back to the traditional ceramic process of shaping the clay, allowing it to dry, and eventually painting it piece by piece.  “Billie,” a blue-and-white porcelain sculpture by Adam Chau, from “The Joy and Sorrow of Imagining.” Chau created a fictional child using AI-generated images based on childhood photographs of himself and his husband. On view at the Northern Clay Center from September 19 to November 1. Credit: Courtesy of Adam Chau The three-year long project, “The Joy and Sorrow of Imagining,” will debut at the Northern Clay Studio in Minneapolis in September. Billie is the centerpiece of the exhibition.   “The part that I find the most human is this introspective component that has led him to use AI in this way,” said Lauren Tucci, the studio’s exhibitions and collections manager. “It’s the desire of two people wanting to have children and only maybe one person being able to contribute to a biological child.” Chau’s work, Tucci added, speaks to what it means to be human today while contributing to a larger conversation about art in the digital age.   “Ceramics is a very traditional and at times stuck in traditions,” she said. “I think acknowledging our digital time is necessary. It’s a unique contemporary lens for ceramics specifically.”  An imagined world A few months ago, Chau started working with Michael Biello on the “Semiqueercentennial” exhibition at the Biello Martin studio in Philadelphia. The exhibition was part of “Radical Americana,” a large initiative organized by the Clay Studio in Philadelphia that paired artists and organizations to respond to America’s 250th anniversary.  For Biello, 74, a ceramic and theater artist, and his partner, music producer Dan Martin, 73, the 37-year old Chau initially seemed to have come from a different world.  The two grew up in a different generation and a different world where the technology that Chau incorporates into his work didn’t exist and where art meant a slow and physical process — one that can take weeks or years of creating.  As Biello spent more time with Chau’s work, he began to see what their art had in common: queer love and intimacy. But seeing how Chau used AI to imagine what queer love might have looked like in China made them a little less fearful of the technology.  “I don’t use AI and I don’t even want to see it and I don’t really care about it,” Biello said. “But he changed my feeling of that because of the way he’s using it.” Martin echoed that sentiment. “I don’t think people are going to AI with that particular question. It’s his guiding of the technology that makes it beautiful.” For Biello, the AI behind Chau’s work became less important than the stories he was using it to tell.  “His work just generates love,” Biello said. “The AI piece of it and all of that becomes not that important to me anymore.” Credit: Courtesy of The Clay Studio Credit: Courtesy of The Clay Studio Credit: Courtesy of The Clay Studio “Presidential China” by Adam Chau, 2026, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through December. For “Radical Americana,” Chau turned to the long-running tradition of presidential china — the custom tableware each president selects for use in the White House. After researching the presidential china collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he created a set of plates for a conceptual gay president.  Like his other bodies of work, Chau’s presidential china involved digital technology, but no AI. Jennifer Zwilling, curator and director of artistic programs at the Clay Studio who helped organize “Radical Americana,” said she appreciates that Chau’s work illustrates political ideas while imagining possibilities that have yet to exist.  Zwilling, who has known Chau for a decade and is skeptical of the use of AI in the art field, said that Chau approaches technology differently.  “There are people who sometimes get interested in new technologies and they let the new technology take over the process,” she said. “But Adam was doing it in a very smart and creative way to allow him to push his ideas forward rather than letting the tool kind of take the front seat.” Recently, Chau published an article, “Our Obsession with Reality,” in Studio Potter that considers AI through the history of collage. Chau argues that AI is doing something artists have been doing for generations: taking existing images and elements and turning them into something new.   “AI is doing the same thing,” Chau said. “It’s just doing it in a more seamless way.”  But where AI will take the art world, Chau said, remains an open question. “I really don’t know,” he said. “That is the question. I haven’t figured it out.” ...read more read less