Yu-Hsu Chou is a Taiwanese artist working primarily with photography. His practice begins with a fundamental question: Is what we see the world itself, or a reality constructed through perception, technology, and existing systems of knowledge?

For Chou, photography has never been merely a tool for representing the world. On one hand, it has long been regarded as evidence that something existed; on the other, through framing, composition, and technical manipulation, it can generate relationships that never existed in reality. Chou draws on this inherent trust in photography to make a world that does not exist appear as though it might be real. This translation of photographic truth lies at the core of his practice: photography can affirm the existence of things while simultaneously making them uncertain.

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Chou’s early practice grew out of street photography, where he searched for accidental, unfamiliar, and almost surreal moments within everyday life. As his work developed, he gradually stopped waiting for the unexpected to emerge on its own and began to intervene more actively in the construction of images. Landscapes, light, digital signals, the body, and memory became materials that could be reorganized and transformed. Reality was no longer the destination of photography, but the point of departure for imagining how another world might be possible.

Mythology, science fiction, the cosmos, death, memory, and the invisible recur throughout his work. These subjects are not simply romantic imaginings of the unknown; rather, they serve as different points of entry into a larger question of how human beings come to understand the world. When something cannot be seen with the naked eye, named through language, or fully captured by scientific instruments, can we still perceive its presence or effects?

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From this perspective, Chou transforms terrestrial landscapes into unfamiliar planets, imagines digital glitches as signals that cannot yet be decoded, considers dark matter as an invisible force that nevertheless continues to shape the universe, and turns to his own shadow to reflect on memory, life, and death. Science, mythology, and personal experience coexist in his work not to validate one another, but to reveal a shared condition: every way of understanding the world also contains something beyond its reach.

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Chou approaches artistic creation as an ongoing process of assembling knowledge and experience. Each work is like a fragment drawn from a different time and space. Its meaning is not predetermined, but gradually emerges through its relationship with other images, ideas, and experiences. His different bodies of work therefore do not seek to provide a single answer to the unknown. Instead, they continually shift the position from which we look, allowing reality to reveal its own incompleteness and uncertainty.

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Across his different series, Chou continues to return to the same question: What might exist beyond the reality we already know? This question also shapes his fundamental understanding of photography: a means of creating infinite possibilities from within the limits of reality.

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Reality is not the endpoint of the image, but the starting point for imagination and creation. Art does not offer definitive answers to the world; through repeated acts of seeing, reorganizing, and creating, it moves toward possibilities that have yet to be understood or named.