Cornelia Parker is a British conceptual artist known for her transformative processes of destruction and reconstruction. Collaborating with scientists and technicians, she employs acts such as explosion, crushing, and suspension to expose the tension between fragility and resilience. Her works poetically examine how matter, time, and memory intertwine through processes of disintegration and renewal. Cold…

Doris Salcedo is a Colombian contemporary artist known for her deeply poetic explorations of violence, disappearance, trauma, and memory. Her work reconfigures everyday materials—such as furniture, clothing, and shoes—into quiet yet powerful memorials. Rather than narrating trauma directly, Salcedo transforms material and spatial forms into vessels of remembrance, allowing absence itself to speak with haunting…

Luzene Hill (Cherokee Nation, USA, born 1956) is a performance and installation artist addressing sexual violence, the female body, and Indigenous cultural reclamation. Using textiles, symbols, and ritualized gestures, she transforms trauma into acts of visibility, recovery, and collective healing. In Retracing the Trace, Hill lies on the floor as assistants scatter red cords around…

Daniel Agdag (born in Melbourne, Australia) is renowned for his intricate cardboard sculptures. Through precise handcrafted architectural and mechanical forms, he examines the intersection of logic, imagination, and human curiosity—transforming fragile materials into poetic machines of thought. Using cardboard and trace paper, Agdag creates sculptures merging aeronautical and botanical forms—delicate machines that bridge science and…

Tatsuya Tanaka (born 1981, Kumamoto, Japan) creates imaginative miniature worlds using everyday objects. Through his witty compositions and photography, he transforms the mundane into poetic microcosms—revealing wonder in the familiar and prompting viewers to rediscover beauty in ordinary life. In Electricity (Kumamoto Ver.) and Knowledge Box, Tanaka transforms sockets, cables, and cardboard boxes into intimate…

Yin Xiuzhen (born 1963, Beijing) creates installations addressing globalization, memory, and identity. Using worn clothes and everyday materials, she sews and reconstructs personal experience into social reflection—transforming softness and fabric into poetic symbols of time, belonging, and change. In Portable City, Yin builds miniature cityscapes inside suitcases using discarded clothes. Each soft, tactile “city” becomes…

Ishida Tetsuya (1973–2005) was a Japanese contemporary artist known for surreal paintings merging human figures with machines and architecture. Through precise brushwork, he explored isolation, anxiety, and the loss of individuality in modern society—creating poetic yet unsettling allegories of existence. In Search / Sosaku and Prisoner, Ishida fuses human bodies with trains and schools, symbolizing…

Mike Kelley (1954–2012) was a major American contemporary artist known for exploring memory, trauma, and social conditioning through sculpture, installation, and performance. Using toys and everyday objects, he exposed repressed cultural psychology while blurring boundaries between high art and popular culture with irony and wit. Kandor 16B encases Superman’s fictional hometown in glowing glass, symbolizing…

Ron Mueck (born 1958, Australia) is celebrated for his hyperrealistic sculptures of the human body. Using silicone, fiberglass, and resin, he captures intricate details of skin and emotion. By manipulating scale—enlarging or miniaturizing figures—he exposes the fragility, solitude, and existential gravity of human life. Standing 4.5 meters tall, Boy (1999) depicts a crouching youth rendered…

Jenny Saville (born 1970, UK) is known for her monumental depictions of the female body. Through dense brushwork and distorted forms, she challenges social ideals of beauty and representation, revealing the body as a site of vulnerability, desire, and defiance. Propped (1992) portrays a nude woman seated before a mirror from a confrontational angle. Saville’s…

James Jean is a Taiwanese-American artist celebrated for his surreal synthesis of Eastern and Western aesthetics. Blending mythology, dreams, and cultural symbols, he crafts poetic visual worlds where emotion and subconscious intertwine between reality and fantasy. These works trace Jean’s evolving vision of desire, memory, and myth. AIDES LAPIN fuses human and rabbit forms to…

Yoshitoshi Kanemaki is a Japanese sculptor known for surreal wooden figures with multiple faces. Using the traditional ichiboku-zukuri technique, he carves from a single block of hinoki wood, merging realism and surrealism to explore fragmented identity, emotion, and the fluidity of being. TAYUTA Capris depicts a young girl whose head multiplies into shifting faces, symbolizing…

Jo Lane is an Australian contemporary artist whose minimalist sculptures explore psychological tension and emotional weight. Using materials such as hydrostone, PVC wire, and metal, she translates the quiet pressure of thought into tangible form, balancing fragility and resilience. LOAD (2025) combines hydrostone clusters with radiating PVC wires to visualize the burden of thought and…

Chiharu Shiota (born 1972, Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese artist known for her immersive installations composed of threads, keys, suitcases, and clothing. Her woven networks symbolize the interconnection of memory and thought, exploring themes of life, absence, and existence. Blending performance and spatial construction, Shiota transforms emotion into tangible space—turning memory into a poetic, walkable…

Susan Stewart’s On Longing is a foundational study on how objects and scale shape memory, desire, and identity. She examines the symbolic roles of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, and the collection. The miniature contains vast worlds within small forms, evoking intimacy and childhood memory. The gigantic overwhelms the body, symbolizing power and authority.…

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a French-American sculptor known for exploring memory, trauma, and motherhood. Using materials such as fabric, metal, and glass, she transformed psychological experiences into physical forms. A pioneer of feminist and psychoanalytic sculpture, Bourgeois centered emotion as the language of creation. The Cells series (1989–2008) consists of enclosed chambers built from steel…

Mona Hatoum (born 1952, Beirut) is a Lebanese-Palestinian artist whose installations, sculptures, and videos address displacement, conflict, and the politics of the body. Transforming domestic objects into unsettling forms, she exposes the fragility of human existence amid systems of power and control. Her minimalist yet charged works inhabit the threshold between poetry and danger. Remains…

Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963, UK) is a leading contemporary sculptor renowned for her casts of negative spaces. Using materials such as plaster, resin, and concrete, she transforms the invisible interiors of domestic objects and architecture into tangible forms, exploring absence, memory, and the traces of human presence. House (1993) was a life-sized cast of an…

Do Ho Suh (born 1962, Seoul) is a contemporary artist whose practice centers on the concepts of home, identity, and migration. He reconstructs his lived spaces in translucent fabric, translating architecture into memory. Through delicate, portable structures, Suh transforms the notion of “home” into an emotional landscape shaped by movement, belonging, and time. Jet Lag…

Thomas Doyle’s Cleave is a small mixed-media sculpture enclosed within a circular glass dome. Inside this fragile sphere, fragments of houses and familiar objects appear broken and reassembled, as if memory itself has been split apart. The dome functions like a frozen lens—preserving a moment of rupture while keeping it distant and untouchable. Its textures…

Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is a key phenomenological study on how intimate spaces—houses, rooms, corners, drawers, and nests—shape memory and imagination. Rather than viewing architecture as function, Bachelard explores how people inhabit space and how childhood memories dwell within it. For him, the house is not just shelter but a vessel for dreams,…