Han Yu ’06 meets me on the third floor of the Carpenter Center, with the low afternoon sun streaming through the large plate-glass windows. She has recently been awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts by the Office for the Arts (OFA). She wears a black military flight suit. Her pinstriped pants hang on a hanger in one window. She walks with a determined step, her feet set wide.

Yu is building a factory.

At least, that’s what she calls it. For her senior thesis, this Visual and Environmental Studies concentrator has made a workshop for the construction of her work. Dubbed “Yu Industries,” complete with its own barcode, the installation includes all the components that went into the making of some of her art, from the blueprint drawings that inspire some of her sculptural forms to the painting and glazing area where the works are finished.

The factory itself, on the third floor of the Carpenter Center, serves as her thesis.

“I am fascinated with tools and, by extension, with utility,” says Yu. The flight suit is also part of her “factory” method: “It’s really good to be able to change clothes,” Yu says. “Rituals are very important for getting into the mode of production.”

“I’m really designing a process,” she says.

Her work is also about recording a moment. She has kept intricate visual diaries, in which all the entries flow together continuously to make a seamless image. The tool belt, too, serves as a “marker of what happened on a particular day, the way my hand was shaped,” according to Yu.

The blueprints in Yu’s factory are also inspired by her doodles. Those large graph-paper sheets, covered in small, intricate drawings are reminiscent of the pen and pencil work of Lee Bontecue, whose small drawings often gave rise to similar pieces.

“I like using iterations of one idea,” says Yu. “I like it when you can recognize mundane elements in artwork, but together it becomes something amazing, something greater.”

After graduation, Yu will be going to New York to work in web design. “It’s hard to depend on art,” she says, “Actually, completely unrealistic.” She does hope to show her work more widely, and currently has some pieces in a show in Brooklyn.

Jack Megan, director of the OFA, has high words of praise for Yu. “She is operating in a more abstract than representational mode, in a way that is quite different from the mainstream of Harvard art,” he says. Her work, he continues, is “both exceptionally fine and represents an adventure into territory we don’t often see.”

As I leave, Yu firmly shakes my hand, and then strides purposefully back to her factory bench in her black flight suit, finishing up another day’s artistic work at Yu Industries.

—Alexander B. Fabry