Porcelain, with its delicate yet enduring nature, has become an unexpected yet powerful medium for artists probing the boundaries of post-humanism and transhumanism. By merging traditional craftsmanship with futuristic concepts, these creators challenge perceptions of humanity’s evolution.

One approach involves sculpting fragmented or hybridized human forms—cybernetic limbs emerging from cracked porcelain torsos, or faces dissolving into digital patterns. These works literalize the transhumanist ideal of human-machine integration while underscoring the fragility of such transformations. The material’s historical association with refinement contrasts sharply with depictions of technological invasion, creating potent visual tension.

Other artists employ porcelain’s luminous whiteness as a canvas for biotechnological imaginings. Intricate vascular systems rendered in cobalt blue recall both 18th-century decoration and CRISPR gene editing diagrams. Some installations incorporate interactive elements—porcelain figures with embedded sensors that respond to viewers, embodying the post-human blurring of observer and subject.

The medium’s paradoxical qualities—strong yet brittle, ancient yet futuristic—make it ideal for questioning what constitutes “human” in an age of AI and genetic engineering. A 2023 Berlin Biennale piece featured self-shattering porcelain androids, their destruction patterns algorithmically predetermined—a meditation on programmed obsolescence in biological and artificial life.

These works don’t merely depict post-human scenarios; their materiality performs it. When a porcelain hand crumbles to reveal fiber-optic “bones,” the artwork physically enacts the very transformations it examines, offering audiences a multisensory engagement with these profound philosophical questions.