About Yen Qin

About the Artist

About Yen Qin

Yen Qin is the ceramic practice of Melbourne-based artist and designer Georgina Yen Qin Lee. Her work explores identity, migration and cultural inheritance, reimagining functional forms as vessels of memory that reconnect fragments across time and place.

View Artworks → Shop Dynasty →

I work with clay to hold stories. Forms are simple and functional, but they carry questions about where we come from, what we keep, and how memory travels between generations.

I look for clarity in line and proportion, and for colour that feels both familiar and slightly new. My aim is to make objects that live in daily use and still speak to history.

—Georgina Yen Qin Lee

Practice & approach

Grounded in research and studio making, Yen Qin's practice moves between sculpture and functional ware. Repeated forms, quiet ornament, and a considered palette create continuity across projects.

Dynasty Tableware Collection

From Studio to Table

Dynasty is the tableware extension of Yen Qin's practice. The same ideas that shape the studio—lineage, movement, memory—are resolved for the table through three signature forms and five colourways that draw from Yen Qin's Peranakan Chinese heritage.

Designed to mix across colours and shapes, dishwasher-safe, and made to last, Dynasty brings an art-led point of view to daily dining.

Explore Dynasty →

Biography

Georgina Yen Qin Lee uses the medium of ceramics as a conduit to reconnect with her Peranakan and Chinese ancestral roots while exploring her lived experience growing up as an Asian woman in Australia.

Georgina’s connection with ceramics goes beyond its materiality and artistic expression; it is also rooted in the medium’s historical and cultural contexts. In researching the significance of ceramics in her culture, Georgina unearths stories and ancestral customs lost over centuries of her family’s diaspora.

Georgina’s practice engages with the potential of cultural exchange and amalgamation, exploring the power of objects to transcend differences and foster understanding. Her works extend an invitation to viewers to participate in their own cultural rediscovery, creating a space that celebrates heritage and cultural identity within contemporary life.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Exhibitions

2024	TABLED, curated by The Association of Ceramics Australia, Manly Art Gallery & Museum and Peter Gilmore Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Sydney
2023	Everybody’s Heard of a Dragon, curated by James Lemon and Bobby Corica Craft Victoria, Melbourne Tracing Change, Modern Times, Melbourne The Vessel Project, Craft Victoria, Melbourne July featured artists, Bouvardia, Melbourne
2022	It’s Not Just Blue, Craft Victoria, Melbourne A Gentle Unwinding, Modern Times, Melbourne Reclaim, Brunswick Street Gallery, Craft Contemporary, Melbourne Concurrence, Warrandyte Pottery, Craft Contemporary, Melbourne EMERGE: Tenth Edition, Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne 1000 Vases, Galerie Joseph, 78 Rue de Turenne, Paris Clay Connected, Melbourne Design Week, 1280 Gallery, Melbourne Small Works Art Prize 2022, Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne
2021	Winter Exhibition, Thrown Contemporary, London, United Kingdom
2014	FAUX MUSEUM, c3 contemporary art space, curated by Melissa Loughnan, Anusha Kenny, Kate Tucker and Ace Wagstaff Nothing’s Happened Since Yesterday with Kenny Pittock, curated by Naima Morelli, Galleria 291 Est, San Lorenzo, Rome, Italy SUB12, The Substation, Newport, curated by Will Foster, with Liz Dunn, Lara Thoms, Arlo Mountford, Rowan McNaught, Laresa Kosloff, Jessie Bullivant, Charlie Sofo, Isadora Vaughan, Agnes So, Dylan Hammond, Travis Englefield Artworks and Exchanges, with Kate Just, Monte Masi, et al. An exhibition as part of the international conference on socially engaged art: Spectres of Evaluation, Footscray Community Arts Centre and Incinerator Gallery. Business As Usual, Bus Projects, Collingwood Campus, George Paton Gallery, Parkville, curated by Alison Lasek