Biography

Lana Dai is a New York City-based ceramicist who began working in ceramics after a career in product and UX design. Drawn to the tactile and intuitive nature of working with clay, she gradually shifted her focus toward developing a personal ceramic practice centered on porcelain, paper clay and abstracted floral forms.

Inspired by gardens, seasonal change, and the flowers that have surrounded her throughout her life, Lana builds each floral form by hand, combining individual petals inspired by different flowers into compositions that suggest rather than replicate a flower. Her work explores the tensions between strength and fragility, perfection and imperfection, and the fleeting and the enduring. She is particularly interested in flowers as keepsakes and carriers of memory, and in how something temporary can be transformed into an enduring object that holds associations with people, places, and moments in time.

Artist Statement

I have always made things, although for much of my adult life I didn't think of myself as an artist. I attended LaGuardia High School in New York City, where I was exposed to studio art, ceramics, sculpture, architecture, photography, and art history. As a first-generation immigrant, I felt a strong pressure to make something of myself and to pursue a path that felt secure and successful. I went on to study business at NYU Stern and eventually worked in consulting and technology as a UX designer. But throughout those years, I always felt that something was missing. I kept finding my way back to making things with my hands. I took ceramics classes while in business school, and later, while working at PwC, I enrolled in a professional pastry program on a whim. Four nights a week, I was absorbed in making things by hand. I was particularly drawn to cake decorating, where I made flowers from buttercream, fondant, and modeling chocolate. Looking back, I realize I was continually searching for a place where I could make something that was entirely my own.

When I eventually returned to ceramics, I felt that creativity come back with a force I hadn't experienced in years. I made many different things as I tried to find my voice, but everything changed when I discovered porcelain. I was drawn to its translucency, lightness, and fragility, as well as its long history and connection to my Chinese heritage. Porcelain allowed me to create forms that carried something of the delicacy I had found in the flowers I made in pastry school, but with a permanence that cake could never have. Flowers have always held a particular place in my life. Some of my earliest memories are of them, including waiting with my grandfather in China for a flower that bloomed only in the middle of the night. Later, gardening became a way for me to care for my family home and to connect with my mother. I am drawn to flowers not only for their beauty, but for their fleeting lives, their imperfections, and their cycles of growth and decay. They can also become keepsakes, carrying memories of people, places, and moments that we want to hold onto.

I don't try to recreate flowers literally. I build floral forms from individual porcelain petals, often drawing from different flowers and combining them into something that is recognizable as floral but does not belong to any particular species. The forms are made from very thin porcelain paper clay, which I shape over a balloon and deliberately dry unevenly. As the balloon is slowly deflated, the clay warps and sometimes cracks. I then layer petals onto the surface, responding intuitively to their shape, color, and movement. The weight of the petals can change the form again in the kiln. These are things I cannot completely control, and I have come to value that unpredictability. The cracks, warping, and irregularities of the underlying form exist alongside petals that I carefully construct and try to make precise. That contrast reflects something personal for me: what appears composed and controlled on the outside can contain something much less orderly underneath. I often keep things inside and reveal them only when I feel I can trust someone. In this way, the tension between perfection and imperfection, strength and fragility, concealment and expression has become part of the forms I make.

For much of my life, I thought making something of myself meant building a successful career and becoming the person I was expected to be. Leaving that career to pursue art has meant starting over and, in many ways, rediscovering who I am. I am still uncertain about where this path will lead and still learning how to find my place in the art world. But perhaps that uncertainty is part of the work too. After years of trying to make something of myself, I am now trying to find myself through making.

Contact

Send me an email or call/text me at 646-338-1925.