Brubey Hu is an artist, graphic designer, and educator based in Toronto, Canada. Her work is a mediation on memory, migration, the mundane and domesticity as shaped through a transcultural feminist lens. Working across painting, installation, sculpture, and text, she employs strategies of subtraction and estrangement to capture fleeting moments that shape personal and collective histories. Originally born in Xiamen, China, Hu moved to Vancouver, Canada for high school, and then to the United States for undergrad. She has worked as a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the University of Waterloo. She holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and an MFA from the University of Waterloo as a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) scholar, and is pursuing an MA in Gender and Feminist Studies at York University. 

Hu’s work has been exhibited at ShanghART Gallery in Shanghai; Art Mur in Montreal; Field Projects, A Space Gallery and Accent Sisters in New York; Zalucky Contemporary, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Cambridge Galleries, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, and Art Gallery of Mississauga, all in Ontario. She has participated in numerous artist residencies, including BAiR Emerging at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, and International Residency at NARS Foundation in New York, USA. She is also the co-director of Tangent Collective. Her practice is supported by Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

Thank you for having me! I was born in Xiamen, China, and emigrated to Canada as a teenager, and later to the U.S. for my undergraduate studies before returning to Canada. I grew up with early access to the internet and tools like Photoshop, which allowed me to explore visual art and design in a virtual space. At the time, though, I didn’t consider pursuing visual arts as a career due to the heavy academic workload in public school in China. After moving to Canada for high school, I found myself with more free time outside of school and decided to formally study drawing and painting. This led me to pursue undergraduate studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art and later, graduate studies in studio art at the University of Waterloo. Although I trained in digital design, I have always returned to the tactile pull of painting and sculpture. In my paintings, the canvas becomes a space to capture and reflect fragments of everyday encounters, where the ordinary and the imagined begin to blur. In my sculpture work, I translate domestic materials into forms carrying physical and emotional residues, a vessel of mundane lived experience.  

Who or what are your biggest influences, both artistically and personally?

Personally, my mother has been my greatest influence. She devoted an immense amount of time to both her career and our family, and she was my closest companion growing up, guiding me through many challenges, especially those shaped by cultural displacement. She has also been truly supportive of my art practice. 

My recent work on domestic labour is rooted in the experience of her and other female elders in my life. Growing up, I watched the women in my family balance demanding careers with nearly sole responsibility for housework and caregiving, while men around them rarely participated. I didn’t fully register the weight of that imbalance until I moved away, and later when I married. A turning point came through my mother-in-law reframes housework as xiu xing (修行), a Buddhist-inspired practice of self-cultivation through mindful repetition. This shifted how I understand repetition, not as drudgery, but as a site of presence and attention. 

Intellectually, feminist theorists like Silvia Federici and Chizuko Ueno, and sociologists like Arlie Hochschild have shaped how I understand the domestic as a political and economic space. Artistically, I am influenced by many artists across regions, hard to say I have a favourite now. I am drawn to practices that work closely with the textures of everyday life and unconventional materials.  

Your work meditates on memory and migration. How do you approach translating lived experience into visual form?

I think of my work as a form of translation. Having moved across cities—Xiamen, Vancouver, Baltimore, and now Toronto, I often return to spaces I’ve lived only through memory and dreams. I reconstruct these spaces by piecing together fragments: an element from one place, an emotion from another, assembling something that belongs fully to neither. When I revisited my grandparents’ empty apartment after their passing, I realized that what holds emotional weight isn’t just the architecture, but the objects that once filled it. I am more interested in the relational residues that linger in the mental space. 

This translational approach also extends to language and gesture. In my paintings, I blur the boundaries between punctuation marks and Chinese character strokes, between legible text and pure mark-making. I’m drawn to the aphasic state, a condition of not quite fitting into any one linguistic or cultural. The illegibility isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s an invitation for viewers to bring their own memories into the work.

How does a transcultural feminist lens shape the questions you explore in your work?

Moving between cultural contexts has given me a kind of double vision as I experience structures from within while also seeing them critically. My work has been focusing on domestic space as both intimate and political, where care and labour unevenly distributed and habitually invisible. Influenced by feminist and social reproduction theories, I attend to mundane household materials, like soap bubble, sponges, piles of socks. The kitchen and the bathroom are not just spaces of care, but also sites where broader social and political relations take shape. 

My transcultural positioning means I am constantly holding multiple frameworks at once: Confucian conceptions of family and the household, Marxist feminist theory, social reproduction theory, and affect theory. None of these constrains or contains one another, and I work directly with the friction in my practice. Migration further shapes my material choices, as domestic life shifts across contexts, leaving behind traces that are both personal and structural. I think of transnational domesticity as an ongoing, dynamic process through embodied process formed through repetition, habit, and gradual attunement to new spaces. My work engages with the memories, fragments, and lived experiences between locations. 

What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?

The challenge of straddling multiple worlds culturally, linguistically, and professionally, has been both a difficulty and driving force of my practice. The aphasic feeling of not being fully legible in any one context, of carrying cultural baggage that doesn’t translate neatly, used to feel like a deficit. Over time, I realized that living across cultures actually sharpened my sensitivity to material and emotional surroundings in ways that feed into the work, often before I fully recognize it myself. 

Practically, sustaining a studio practice alongside other paid work is an ongoing negotiation. I am fortunate that my day job, teaching digital media design, is a dialogue with my art practice rather than separate from it. Conversations with students and fellow faculty, the process of articulating ideas, the troubleshooting of creative problems, have made me a clearer thinker and a more confident speaker about my own work. 

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

My current body of work, Domestic Dust & Dream, is an ongoing series of sculptures and installations using everyday materials like soap, laundry pods, resin, salt, and hair. These works looks at domestic labour as a form of social reproduction, the ongoing, largely invisible work of sustaining life and maintaining shared space. I have been casting socks in translucent materials, turning them into objects that resemble candy or popsicles, tackling the entanglement of consumption and care in domestic realm. I am also working on a “textile” made from laundry pods bound with strands of my own hair, linking bodily residue to systems of maintenance.

Text and photo courtesy of Brubey Hu

Website: https://brubey-hu.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brubeyhu/