Artist Statement

My name is Yuhsuan Pai, a Taiwanese artist currently studying for a BA in Fine Art at Kingston School of Art. My practice moves between figuration and abstraction, grounded in drawing and painting, while expanding into sculpture and installation. Across these forms, I explore the intersections of materiality, bodily engagement, and emotional experience.

Working across disciplines allows me to investigate colour, texture, brushwork, structure, scale, and performative gesture as interconnected forces. These decisions are inseparable from the physicality of making—the tangibility of pigment, the resistance of surfaces, and the sensations generated through movement. I am particularly interested in how shifting formats can disrupt lyrical narratives and respond to the surrounding space.

I find a distinct courage in abstraction: a willingness to trust intuition, embrace uncertainty, and reveal something internal through process. My work is shaped by subtle negotiations—knowing when to push, when to pause, and how to follow an evolving surface. It often seeks to capture the intensity and fragility of the present moment, holding gestures that feel both urgent and contemplative.

My recent work explores how material processes can embody and confront the physicality of the body as a means of articulating personal experiences of loss and grief. By merging pictorial and sculptural territories, I position the work as a site for questioning and reimagining the body beyond the conventional frame—fractured, deconstructed, yet still deeply embodied. The body emerges as both subject and metaphor, with absence conveyed through residual traces. The work reflects tensions between repair and rupture, and between the desire for stability and the impossibility of resolution within an inherently unstable state. Through materiality and tactility, it bears witness to the lived reality of pain—its vulnerability, precarity, and intensity—tracing temporal and affective dimensions.

Ultimately, I seek to create tactile, sensory encounters that foreground the relationship between material and maker. The labour of process, the weight of materials, and the bodily presence embedded within the work become ways of negotiating loss. Through this, my practice aims to create spaces for introspection, encouraging audiences to dwell, sense, and interpret beyond purely visual engagement. The work exists within tensions between absence and presence, fragility and persistence, ephemerality and endurance, and memory and material reality as they unfold over time.

Unresolved, installation view (detail).