Noel Cheung|Curator|Ceramicist
Noel Cheung 張知行
⸰ curator ⸰
⸰ researcher ⸰
⸰ maker ⸰
Noel Cheung is a London-based independent curator working across contemporary design, architecture, and art.
Her practice explores how material culture shapes experiences of migration, memory, and belonging in postcolonial Britain. She collaborates with museums, cultural organisations, and creative practitioners to develop research-led exhibitions, curatorial frameworks, and public programmes.
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Copyright © 2026 Noel Cheung.
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Carrier Bag of Exile
2025
Black stoneware clay with layered matte translucent glaze, created as part of the project Forming New Folklores: Made in Exile.
—
What Holds?
a leaf
a gourd
a shell
a net
a bag
a sack
a bottle
a pot
a box
a recipient
a story
a bag of stars
—
Carrier Bag of Exile explores the ceramic vessel as both a functional object and a conceptual container for memory, displacement, and survival. Drawing on American author Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the work reframes the vessel as a language of care: something that holds and endures.
The ceramic form references improvised vessels associated with migration and movement. Deliberate traces of making and subtle deformations are rendered as evidence of labour, echoing the instability embedded in diasporic experiences.
Clay is used here not as a neutral medium, but as a historically charged material – fragile yet enduring, breakable yet capable of surviving centuries. Through this tension, the work asks how objects carry stories of exile, and how making itself can become an act of holding onto what might otherwise be lost.