This practice-based thesis explores how functional ceramics can materialize diasporic memory and political solidarity through everyday objects.

Drawing on my experiences as a member of the Chinese diaspora who has lived in China, Jordan, the United States, and Hong Kong, “Vessels of Memory” presents a collection of ten hand-crafted ceramic works that examine questions of mobility, belonging, and political responsibility. Rather than treating ceramics as purely aesthetic objects, I position bowls, cups, vases, and household vessels as sites where cultural identity and political commitment are enacted through daily use.

The project is informed by material culture studies, diaspora studies, and settler colonial studies, engaging the work of Aihwa Ong, Lisa Lowe, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, and Dean Itsuji Saranillio. It argues that the Chinese diaspora should be understood not only through narratives of migration, exclusion, and success, but also through its entanglements with broader colonial and imperial structures. By combining Chinese ceramic practices with Palestinian symbols, language, and visual culture, the collection reflects on how solidarity may be practiced materially while remaining attentive to the ethical tensions of representation.

Through an integration of creative practice and critical reflection, this thesis demonstrates how making itself functions as a mode of knowledge production. It proposes that functional ceramics can transform political commitments into embodied, everyday rituals, allowing ordinary domestic objects to become enduring vessels of memory, relational identity, and decolonial imagination.