Artist Highlight - Kuan-Yu Chou

1. Suspended Memory begins with a chair, one of the most familiar objects in daily life. What drew you to this object as a way to think about memory?

I believe the chair is an object we encounter every day, constantly, it holds countless memories, quarrels, embraces, intimacy, conversations, and distance. All our joys and sorrows, all our dialogues, are completed on a chair. We have an intimate and distant relationship with chairs; we can choose to leave them at any moment, voluntarily or involuntarily. In this way, the chair is very much like memory. We too have an intimate and distant relationship with our own memories, sometimes they feel clear and familiar, sometimes obscure and unclear. We can choose to forget memories, or we can choose to hold them tightly. So I use this chair as a starting point to reinterpret memory through this object, and in doing so, to reinterpret the object itself.

2. The chair is no longer grounded, but suspended from a hook. What happens to an object of support when it is made unstable?

We assume both chairs and memories are reliable and stable. But as time passes, I've come to understand that memory too can fail, it fades, slips away no matter how hard we try to grasp it. When memory (or the chair, as its metaphor) is suspended, when people still cling to the belief that it is stable and dependable, I reverse that assumption. When it becomes unstable, function is inverted, metaphor is reinterpreted, and human perception is reopened. It becomes something lighter, easily hung on a wall, suspended from a hook. Does this instability create discomfort in viewers? Or does it awaken something within them?

3. Your painting seems to hold something blurred, emotional and difficult to grasp. How do you decide when an image should remain unclear?

Memory has never been concrete or clear to me. An unclear state is my interpretation of memory itself, and simultaneously, my way of capturing the essence of things. The fluidity, blurriness, uncatchable nature, and uncertainty that memory brings, all of these are interpretations through keeping the image unclear. It's like mud clinging to the mind; I express materiality through brushstrokes and color fields, along with that faded, ancient quality of memory.

4. Memory in this work feels fragile, but also heavy. Are you thinking about memory as something that supports us, or something that burdens us?

Memory is an innate ability and capacity we're born with. I think it can be the momentum that propels us forward, but it can also become an unbearable weight in life. We can carry it, or walk shoulder to shoulder with it. So for me, it's fluid, it plays different roles in different relationships. It can be light and bright, like cotton candy, or like grass, fresh yet prickly. But we can inevitably never escape memory; its presence reverberates through our daily lives, suspended, shaken, unstable. Perhaps this is also why, when I see a chair hung up, it feels like memory, suspended nearby, sometimes worn on our bodies, covering us, warming us, becoming the momentum to keep going.

5. The chair is reduced almost to an outline or trace. How does absence operate in this piece?

I think absence operates through negative space and outline. When the chair is reduced to only its contour and traces of use, it no longer serves its load-bearing function. So negative space not only gives viewers space to breathe and imagine, but also subtly suggests an absent presence. And traces are always a matter of the past, they are the marks of use left on material space and objects, the memories left behind. When this happens, absence naturally emerges. Beyond this, the chair's outline is suspended, which simultaneously alludes to a summoning of the subject, creating an emotional division, while also suggesting the absence of the object itself.

6. What do you hope viewers reconsider about the objects they rely on, especially when those objects no longer feel stable?

I hope viewers reconsider the functionality of everyday objects. Perhaps when an object no longer feels stable, with what attitude should we re-embrace it as it trembles on the edge? I think this disrupts our habitual way of seeing or the assumed similarity between function and emotion, metaphor. It can also reverse fixed impressions and reveal the fascinating complexity of different metaphorical meanings within the work. After all, we all view the world through our habits, our lived experience, our memories. Perhaps breaking that framework can bring viewers a different kind of awakening, a different discovery of meaning.