Heidi Lau's new exhibition at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins takes its name from the oldest image of renewal: a serpent coiled in a circle, swallowing its own tail. Ouroboros, which opened on 30 October in the gallery's main space, presents an installation of hand-built ceramic sculpture that treats life, death and rebirth as a single continuous loop, and blurs the line between one kind of being and another.

The show grows out of Pavilion Procession, the large installation Lau made for the Sigg Prize exhibition at M+ in Hong Kong, where she was named one of two winners of the 2025 prize. At its centre in New York stands Within These Very Mountains, the biggest ceramic installation the artist has made since she began suspending her work in 2021 as the first artist in residence at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Glazed in celadon green, pale pink and celestial blue, its craggy, bodily vessels suggest grottoes, scholar's rocks and stalactites, and the whole landscape arrived in a dream Lau kept having.

Since 2021 Lau has worked from the Shanhaijing, the ancient Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas, a text that catalogues hundreds of geographies and fantastical creatures from as early as the fourth century BCE. Its cross-bred species, shape-shifting beings and androgynous beasts feed a practice that mixes anti-colonial and non-linear thinking with the artist's own history. The show also introduces a first for Lau: a technological element. In Kinetic Being, a ceramic spider built by hand creeps around a modelled landscape, part creature and part machine, its twitching movement a small paradox in clay.

Lau was born in Macau in 1987 and lives and works in New York. Her first solo show with the gallery took place in 2024, and her work has since appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the Sigg Prize exhibition at M+. She is represented by Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in collaboration with Matthew Brown, and her sculptures are held by institutions including the Met, M+, the Brooklyn Museum and the Walker Art Center.