iris yirei hu: Unconscious Relics

October 8, 2026–Official Welcome is excited to announce our first solo exhibition with Los Angeles artist iris yirei hu, Unconscious Relics. Following our sold-out Untitled Art Miami Beach Special Projects presentation in 2025, this exhibition includes new paintings, ceramics, and reliquary boxes that bring painting and ceramics together, exploring the parallels between dreaming and death. For the last three years, hu has engaged deeply in dreamwork. One of the practices is social dreaming, a structured group practice where participants share their nighttime dreams to uncover collective cultural insights and societal anxieties rather than searching for personal or therapeutic meanings. Social dreaming has been used in settings as varied as corporate mergers, prison reform, and global crisis tracking. Dreams are discussed through free association, themes emerge, and the unconscious mind is treated as a community thought partner. In dreaming and death alike, we lose consciousness and pass into the realm of the unconscious mind, which processes feelings and memories and guides intuition. This practice echoes hu’s creative work, which revolves around relationship-building, collective learning, and a growing lexicon of symbols ranging from California native plants to teeth and bones to insects and animals. Her paintings and sculptures collect symbols that are universally occurring, like teeth; highly specific to Southern California and her relationship with Tongva elder Julia Bogany, like the Datura flower; or related to her family, like the liver, heart, and kidneys, all key organs in Chinese medicine. Here the symbols are arranged in nearly symmetrical compositions, and their relationships to one another and to a variety of knowledge systems offer each viewer different layers of meaning and interpretation. As in hu’s previous works, the history of painting to which her works refer lives on the walls of caves, the surfaces of pots, and the pages of botanical notebooks. The themes of the exhibition trace the fine boundary between unconsciousness and death, suggesting unique offerings for elders, ancestors, and other beloveds who have moved to the next plane of existence. Like a tomb or reliquary, the gallery’s entrance is guarded, the door is small, and the space faces west so the setting sun writes a song across the floor every day. Some of the new paintings are titled and composed in reference to funerary or viscera vessels, scrying objects, and reliquaries: Chalice, Ossuary (Death Valley), and Reliquary (Fish Carcass). These paintings are vessels for spirit, the body, and reflection. The other four paintings depict deities and rituals: Psychopomp, Ostium, Afterlife, and Omphalos. Together, the paintings in this body of work are informed by the visual language of tomb painting traditions: bilateral symmetry, figures in profile, and flat spaces where objects float without depth or perspective. They form a hermetic system that evokes a particular cultural history of a subterranean underworld. The symbols in hu’s work are not meant to be decoded or solved. Any meaning derived from a snail or liver shifts and changes in relation to a set of symbols that are repeated and rearranged throughout her practice. On the other hand, some symbols do carry specific personal, ecological, and cultural meanings, such as the Datura flower. Datura is so ubiquitous across the Los Angeles landscape, yet rarely acknowledged. These flowers are magical, potent, and deeply poisonous. They embody a fine line between transcendent experience and death. iris yirei hu (b. Los Angeles, CA) is a multidisciplinary journey-based artist from Los Angeles whose work moves across intimate paintings and sculptures to textile installations and public art. In 2022, LA Metro commissioned her to design a large-scale mosaic at the future Westwood/UCLA D Line station slated to open for the 2028 Summer Olympics. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Armory Show; Center for Arts, Research, and Alliances; Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson; Plug In ICA; and John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Her honors include: Ruffin Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia (2026), Longenecker-Roth Artist-in-Residence at UC San Diego (2025), Kohler Arts/Industry Residency in Pottery (2025), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2022), Headlands Center for the Arts Artist-in-Residence (2022), California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (2021), and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2018, 2020). Her writing has appeared in Amerasia Journal and her work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, CARLA, and Hyperallergic, among others.