Most ceramic art asks you to admire it from a distance. Janny Baek’s work makes you want to lean in closer and check if it’s breathing. Her upcoming solo exhibition, Life Forms, opens at Joy Device gallery in Chicago on March 20, running through Might 9, 2026, and from everything I’ve seen of it, it may be one of the more aesthetically jailing programs to land this spring. The pieces collect throughout the gallery space like occupants of an ecosystem you’ve never ever visited however in some way acknowledge. Some types open external like blooms. Others stretch up with limbs that suggest wings, or stems, or shells. None fully commit to being any one thing, which’s precisely the point.
What makes Baek’s ceramics so engaging is the sensation that the firing process didn’t rather complete the task. The sculptures look captured mid-transformation, as though another hour in the kiln may have solved them into something more familiar. Rather, they hold their ambiguity like a posture. That deliberate incompleteness is among the most interesting innovative choices an artist can make, and Baek has developed an entire body of work around it.
Designer: Janny Baek
< img src="// www.w3.org/2000/svg%22%20viewBox=%220%200%201280%20960%22%3E%3C/svg%3E"data-src ="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-012.jpg"alt =" "width ="1280 "height="960 "/ >< img src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-01.jpg" alt ="" width= "1280 "height=" 1280 "/ > Her path to ceramics is almost as uncommon as the work itself. Born in Seoul and raised in Queens, she studied ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design before deviating into animation and toy design as a carver. Then she earned a graduate degree in architecture from Harvard, co-founded an architecture practice in Manhattan, and spent years creating high-end property areas. When the pandemic hit, she went back to clay, establishing a studio in the back of her Flatiron District architecture office. The ceramics world should be grateful for the timing.
That architectural background isn’t incidental. You can see it in the structural reasoning of the pieces, which begin with coiled bases and build upward through successive additions of clay, each element branching from the last. The result is less like sculpting and more like building and construction, or maybe like viewing something grow. Her larger work, Plant Life( 2025 ), stoneware with colored sections rising from white shoots, reads nearly like a site prepare for
a garden on a world where the plants decided to do their own thing. < img src =" https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-014.jpg" alt=""width= "1280"height= "960 "/ >< img src="// www.w3.org/2000/svg%22%20viewBox=%220%200%201280%20960%22%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-014.jpg"alt=""width =" 1280" height= "960 "/ > The method she counts on is nerikomi, a standard Japanese method that includes stacking clay of different colors and slicing through it to reveal the pattern within. But Baek’s
application of it feels more contemporary than the method’s origins might suggest. Color, in her hands, is structural instead of ornamental. It moves through the clay like a current, not like paint on a surface. She has actually described color gradients as” the constant nature of change, “and a multitude of colors as “prospective, abundance, and vigor. “That framing matters. It informs you the work isn’t simply quite, it’s philosophic. < img src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-07.jpg"alt =" "width ="1280"height ="1280"/ >
The piece titles enhance this. Micro-organisms, Glow Sticks, and Outer Galaxies. Prismatic Strolling Cloud. 5 Eyes (Dream State Series). Cloudbloom. They check out like entries in a guidebook to a world that hasn’t been discovered yet, which is probably the most precise way to explain what Baek is developing. Her ceramics operate on what one description of the work calls “dream logic, one that accepts incongruity and dissonance as essential to play and experimentation.”That’s a generous imaginative structure, and it reveals. The work never feels confused or unsolved. It feels purposeful in its strangeness.< img src =" https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-08.jpg "alt= ""width ="1280"height="1280 "/ >< img src="// www.w3.org/2000/svg%22%20viewBox=%220%200%201280%201280%22%3E%3C/svg%3E"data-src ="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-08.jpg"alt ="" width =" 1280"height ="1280"/ > What I discover most revitalizing about Life Forms is that it doesn’t ask you to bring any particular context to it.
You do not need to understand the theory behind nerikomi or have an opinion about contemporary ceramics to stand in front of among these pieces and feel something. They deal with a more fundamental level, the level of taking a look at something unfamiliar and acknowledging it anyway. Like you have actually seen its kind before, someplace between a dream and a nature documentary. < img src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-015.jpg" alt ="" width="1280" height="960"/ > < img src ="// www.w3.org/2000/svg%22%20viewBox=%220%200%201280%20960%22%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-015.jpg" alt ="" width="1280" height="960"/ > < img src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-016.jpg" alt ="" width="1280" height="960"/ > < img src ="// www.w3.org/2000/svg%22%20viewBox=%220%200%201280%20960%22%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/03/janny-baeks-ceramics-look-like-theyre-still-evolving/life-forms-016.jpg" alt ="" width="1280" height="960"/ >