Taiwanese visual artist Yu-Hsu Chou uses photography to ask: how much can we trust what we see? This question runs through all his images, whether landscape, digital signals, urban surfaces, or human shadow. However varied the subject matter is, each work evokes the gap between what is visible and what we believe it to be.
Chou’s images dig into mythology, allegory, and conceptual photography to evoke the ephemeral space between reality and imagination, the familiar and the estranged, the visible and the hidden. For him, photography does not document reality but creates a space where reality can be questioned. As he puts it, “when we no longer know exactly what we are looking at, perhaps that is when seeing truly begins.” Chou, who majored in computer science, developed an interest in perception, representation, memory, and the changing relationship between physical and digital images in 2014, when he shifted his focus from street photography.
Chou’s current extensive solo exhibition, Finite Matter, Infinite Image, at SPACS ART in New York, presents four interconnected bodies of work: Signals, The Last Landscape, The 7th Universe, and Dark Matter. Chou’s images combine a poetic sensibility with a hard-core sci-fi imagination. The Signals series introduces two parallel directions: one saturated with color, the other in black and white. For instance, Howl’s Moving Castle depicts a vivid horizontal landscape overtaken by a flood of electrons. Chou captures electronic glitches, the spontaneous interference generated by screens left to operate on their own, as a parallel world, one that comes across as an untranslated language flickering within digital media.
The black-and-white works in this series deconstruct the chaos of electronic noise, which largely remains invisible to us, into a pixel grid, the basic structure of the digital universe. “We see the image but rarely consider the system that makes the image possible,” Chou says. Only when interference, transmission errors, or network disruptions occur, does that system become visible, distorting and fragmenting into unexpected visual structures. These moments of disruption, these errors, become Chou’s raw material. He reorganizes them into images that sit between information and abstraction, control and accident. Signals raises the question: When the signal breaks down, does the image disappear, or does another reality emerge?
The Last Landscape envisions a post-human future in which nature gradually reclaims traces of civilization. As human structures vanish, nature keeps changing. This series simultaneously evokes two ways of imagining an end, as a final break that concludes history, or as part of an ongoing cycle of change, end, and renewal. Chou does not attempt to predict the future. Instead, he questions how permanent we believe our civilization to be.
Dark Matter moves further away from recognizable representation. Scientists believe dark matter, a mysterious substance, makes up a significant part of the universe, even though it cannot be directly observed. Its existence is inferred from the effects it has on what we can see. In this series, Chou poses the question: must something be visible to be represented? According to Chou, the fields of density, movement, tension, and transformation depicted here serve as evidence of something that seems to exist beyond immediate recognition. Even as the image loses its direct reference to reality, photography may still reveal invisible truths.
Photography has traditionally depended on a visible and recognizable subject standing before the camera. Chou focuses instead on images that move between capture, transformation, and reconstruction. His work sits within the context of contemporary conceptual photography, in dialogue with Thomas Ruff’s inquiry into the meaning of photographic “truth” and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s reflections on time and perception. Chou also approaches photography as a medium capable of reorganizing our relationship with a changing reality. As digital technologies and artificial intelligence increasingly blur the border between what is real and what is fabricated, Chou asks what photography as a medium can still offer even when the image can no longer be understood simply as evidence of the real.
In his 2026 photobook Cosmic Allegories, Chou expands his work beyond the gallery walls. He conceived the book as another physical space for viewing rather than a collection of photographs. The book becomes a portable exhibition. Its pages, white spaces, sequence, and the reader’s hand create a different experience from the gallery wall, the artwork’s scale, and the viewer’s distance. Cosmic Allegories translates the sensory experience of encountering a physical artwork in a gallery into the act of turning pages. As Chou says, the image may remain the same, but the conditions of seeing it change.
About the artist: Yu-Hsu Chou is a Taiwanese photographic artist whose practice explores the boundaries between reality and fiction, nature and technology, and observation and imagination. Combining conceptual inquiry with an interest in mythology, science, digital systems, and speculative futures, he transforms landscapes and electronic signals into images that challenge conventional perceptions of photographic reality.
Chou’s work has been presented internationally at the XIV Florence Biennale in Italy, ART TAIPEI, PLAS Contemporary Art Show in Seoul, and the Setouchi Triennale Art Book Fair in Japan. His solo exhibitions include Signal at NOW Space, Taipei; Post-Viewing at Ip Gallery, Taipei; and Time Traveler: The 7th Universe, presented across Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung.
In 2023, Chou received the Special Commendation from the President, in Photography at the XIV Florence Biennale. He has also received multiple distinctions from the International Photography Awards, Prix de la Photographie Paris, Sony World Photography Awards, and Luxembourg Art Prize. His works The Paper Planet and Landing on Pluto, from The 7th Universe series, are held in the collection of Art Bank Taiwan.
Website : https://www.chouyuhsu.com/
All photos courtesy of the artist and SPACS ART
Featured Image: Yu-Hsu Chou, Landing on Pluto, from The 7th Universe, archival pigment print, 77 3/8” × 51 5/8“(196.5 × 131 cm), 2019, photo courtesy of the artist and SPACS ART
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