Artist Statement

My name is Yuhsuan Pai, and I am a Taiwanese artist currently studying BA Fine Art at Kingston School of Art. My practice moves between figuration and abstraction, centring drawing and painting while expanding into printmaking and sculptural installation. Across these forms, I explore how materiality, bodily engagement, and emotional experience intersect.

Working across multiple disciplines allows me to investigate colour, texture, brushwork, composition, scale, performative gesture, and the dynamics of application as interconnected forces. These decisions are inseparable from the physicality of making—the tangibility of pigment, the resistance of surfaces, and the sensations produced through movement. I am interested in how different formats can disrupt lyricism, complicate narrative, and respond to surrounding space.

There is a distinct courage I find in working with abstraction: a willingness to trust intuition, embrace uncertainty, and reveal something internal through process. I am drawn to the subtle negotiations within making—knowing when to push, when to pause, and how to follow the evolving surface. Much of my work aims to capture the intensity and fragility of the present moment, holding gestures that feel urgent yet contemplative. I seek to create spaces that invite introspection, where viewers can dwell, sense, and interpret rather than engage with the work solely through visual observation.

My recent work explores how material processes can both embody and confront the physicality of the body as a way of articulating loss and grief. I investigate how personal expression and collective histories—particularly ritual practices—interweave, considering where they resonate, overlap, or diverge. By shifting the work from a pictorial object into sculptural territory, the notion of the body emerges as both subject and metaphor, expressed through its absent presence and the tactile, residual materiality that stands in its place. Absence becomes a form of portrayal, suggesting the body through what is missing rather than through direct representation.

I aim to create a tactile and sensory encounter that foregrounds the dynamic relationship between material and maker. The labour of process, the weight of materials, and the bodily presence embedded within the work become empathetic means of conveying loss. Through this, my practice seeks to connect with audiences on physical, emotional, and contemplative levels, while interrogating the tensions between absence and presence, fragility and solidity, provisionality and endurance, and memory and factuality as they unfold across time.

Unmoored In Your Reflection, installation process (detail).