“From my perspective, any creation that comes from sensation and bodily experience inherently holds the potential for action. It allows us to see our relationship with the world, to see our neglected vulnerabilities, and lets people from different cultural backgrounds resonate with one another. Art doesn’t have to be grand,it can be as simple as a person walking through a moment of sensation in daily life, enough to shift the rhythm of the world.”

Embodied knowledge and alternative ways of knowing are frameworks that permeate most of the chatter in the current contemporary art world. Among these dialogues, a whisper unfolds around how creative practices can depict the difficult relationship between physical vulnerability and art practice itself. This shift moves beyond the well-known body art institutional emergence of artists like Ron Athey or Frank B, where the viewer is confronted with mortality and raw immediacy through blood and physical extremity – this wave is a more epistemological, radical, and intimate narrative. This new generation of artists alerts us to how the raw emotional frameworks of displacement, cultural translations, and chronic conditions lead us toward an entirely different form of artistic intelligence. 

But what is this cultural movement really about? It can be associated with a broader conversation about what forms of knowledge and whose bodies are allowed to hold it within Western institutional spaces. With decolonisation of medical discourse and the increasing visibility of diaspora experiences, there is an opening for artists to reflect on illness as an alternative form of perception and embodied experience – allowing nuanced explorations of how bodies carry memories across geographical and temporal boundaries. 

Born in Taiwan and currently pursuing an MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins in London, Kuan-Yu Chou’s practice emerges as a powerful voice within what we may call "peripheral epistemologies"—an understanding that emerges from the peripheries, both “corporeal, subjective, and territorial”—a proposition and reconstruction of ways of being traditionally marginalised by dominant cultural frameworks. The artist's overarching narrative seems to be a deep inquiry into bodily memory and how illness and grief can profoundly influence perception, creating a new conceptual and visual language. Chou’s installations are calm and tactile visual experiences that lead viewers towards vulnerability, suffering, and the meaning of existence, using tactile materials and temporal accumulations. She creates a silent visual language that honours vulnerability rather than exploits it, providing space for reflection instead of immediate comprehension. 

Chuo’s recent body of work embodies these concepts, with paintings heavily influenced by her current life experiences, employing a “poetic approach” to visually narrate internal spaces. Starting with a deep introspection through body memories, she creates a dialogue within “sensation, memory, and space”, focusing on writing and visual notes. Subsequently, she utilises materials with a tactile quality, such as wood, oil paint, charcoal, and textured canvas, with intuition guiding the mark-making. The concluding phase includes scraping, repeated layering, and material application, where the mark becomes a “trace of body and memory”. Although emotion guides most of Chou’s actions and art-making, where external marks express a deep internal dialogue, she views this process not as therapeutic but as an embrace of uncertainty. The ambiguity of emotions is followed by philosophical reading and dialogue, fostering an intricate collective reflection where outcomes are viewed as an ongoing process.

This commitment to embodied and sensory communication extends beyond the creative process and final artworks into what she terms “sensory fields”, where the focus is on creating exhibitions that serve as gateways for emotions. Her installations move away from mere contemplation and seek embodied engagement, inviting us into atmospheres that mirror memory's resistance to narrative coherence. This movement advocates a slower pace within contemporary gallery culture, where attention and engagement foster ongoing conversation. Yet, practically, it requires more than passive participation; it demands vulnerability and presence—attention that recognises, rather than overrides, bodily intuition. 

The quiet radicalism of Chou’s practice is not rooted in therapeutic art; instead, it stems from a rigorous conceptual basis and a sophisticated engagement with phenomenological and affect theory—her references to Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and Barthes exemplify this. This intellectual framework resists rationalisation, never overwhelming the work's core commitment to embodied knowledge and sensation. As Western art institutions grapple with issues of accessibility and representation, Chou's practice offers more than diversity; it proposes methodological alternatives that broaden the understanding of what artistic research can encompass.

Learn more about the artist here.

Cover image

I’m not ready to go, 2025. Oil and Charcoal on canvas, 84 × 60 cm by Kuan-Yu Chou.

All images courtesy of Kuan-Yu Chou.