Inside 1,000 Ways to Hold: Erika Chong Shuch’s Participatory Art Project at Stanford

Why It Matters

The project demonstrates how participatory art can forge tangible community bonds and generate data‑rich narratives, positioning cultural practice as a tool for institutional engagement and storytelling.

Key Takeaways

• Artist creates 1,000 pinch‑pot bowls with Stanford community participants.
• Each bowl captures personal stories about what people “hold” emotionally.
• Finished bowls will be displayed at the Anderson Collection museum exhibit.
• Interactive machine will play makers’ recorded voices when bowls are touched.
• Project measures community engagement through conversation and shared tactile experience.

Summary

Erika Chong Shuch, a visiting artist with Stanford’s Office of the Vice President for the Arts, has launched “1,000 Ways to Hold,” a participatory ceramics project that invites members of the university and its broader community to shape pinch‑pot bowls while discussing what they have held in life.

The initiative aims to produce between 500 and 1,000 bowls, each formed from a simple ball of clay that participants pinch and squeeze. As the bowls take shape, conversations drift from memories and hope to resentment, turning a tactile exercise into a collective oral history.

Chong Shuch emphasizes the intimacy of holding “a ball of earth” in another’s hands, noting that every vessel carries a personal narrative. The completed pieces will travel to the Anderson Collection, where a custom‑built machine will let visitors place a bowl on a platform and hear the maker’s recorded voice emanating from the object.

By coupling hands‑on making with recorded testimony, the project creates a measurable portrait of Stanford’s diverse community, offering a replicable model for institutions seeking immersive, socially‑engaged art experiences.

Original Description

1,000 Ways to Hold is the culmination of a year-long participatory project by Stanford Arts’ 2025–26 VPA Visiting Artist Erika Chong Shuch. Rooted in conversation and clay, the project brings two people together at a time to shape ceramic bowls in pairs while reflecting on a shared prompt: "What have you held, and what has held you?"

Across the academic year, Erika moved through classrooms, community spaces, and everyday corners of campus, creating meeting places for students, staff, faculty, and neighbors to slow down, listen, and make something side by side. Each bowl carries a digital trace of that encounter, forming an archive of meaning embedded directly in the work.

We followed Erika through the full arc of her residency: student workshops, intimate paired-making sessions, the clay preparation and firing, the installation build at the Anderson Collection, and the final activation of the gallery. Inside the Wisch Family Gallery, the bowls gather as a collective invitation to touch, listen, and participate in the memory of hundreds of shared moments.

On view at the Anderson Collection’s Wisch Family Gallery

April 2 – August 17, 2026

Read more in the Stanford Report: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/04/new-exhibition-asks-what-have-you-held

Video: Taylor Jones

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