Youvi moves through life with a rare kind of attentiveness—gentle, steady, and quietly full of love.
She paints, but painting is only one of the ways she moves through the world. She weaves, practices yoga and Thai Boxing, climbs waterfalls, lies flat on the ground and lets the sun slowly sink into her body. These gestures—instinctive, playful, deeply physical—form a rhythm of living that flows naturally into her work.
If one had to name her practice, a life artist might come closest. Someone who doesn’t separate art from living, or the body from feeling, but allows them to move as one continuous current.
Color often arrives before form in Youvi’s paintings. Pinks, oranges, reds, yellows—dopamine-rich hues drift freely across the page, warm and unrestrained.
“Painting, for me, is a way of relaxing,” she says. “Through color, I observe myself—and release the desire to share life.”
Instagram: Youvi Chow
Beginning with the Mother's Body
Youvi’s earliest works began with the most intimate subject she knew: her mother’s body.
“My first painting, Mother & Me, was a symbolic image of my mother's body,” she recalls. “The upper part was her breasts, the lower part her uterus.”
For a long time, she says, the role of mother seemed to eclipse the reality of her mother as a person. “I rarely noticed how her body had changed—until one day, she took off her underwear. I saw her sagging, depleted breasts, and suddenly everything she had carried became so concrete. It broke my heart.”
That moment shifted her gaze. To step outside fixed roles—daughter, mother, family—and to see a woman as a woman felt necessary. This perspective would quietly shape her visual language from then on.
Mother & Me (2012) was used as the cover of a German feminist novel.
Painting as Daily Practice, Painting as Witness
In 2022, Youvi began painting freely, without plans or deadlines—one painting a day. It became a way of observing herself, of giving emotion a place to go.
Her works often return to images of the uterus, birth, enclosure, and gentle support. Bodies are wrapped, held, cradled—never rigid, never isolated.
“One painting is called Soft Yet Strong,” she says. “At the center, a new life is sprouting, supported by a uterus that is both gentle and powerful. To me, that’s a symbol of maternal strength.”
Soft Yet Strong
During creation, she sees herself as an observer. In daily life, she tries to look at her mother the same way—almost as a stranger. “When I step outside the mother-daughter relationship and see her as a woman, an independent person, everything opens up. I want to see her blooming, her beauty, her joy, her pain, her constraints—even her ugliness, without judgment.”
This impulse led to works like Rose, You Can Cry, where forms resemble a uterus and a vagina—like a rose in bloom, like tears falling. “A mother doesn’t have to be strong all the time,” Youvi says. “I want her to be able to laugh, to cry, to express everything freely.”
Rose, You Can Cry
Staying with Female Feeling
As her practice expanded, Youvi’s work moved beyond personal memory toward a broader emotional landscape—one where the female body is not an object, but a living, sensing presence.
Her paintings do not rush toward meaning. They linger. They invite touch, warmth, slowness. They remind us that intimacy does not always announce itself—it often appears quietly, in attention, in care, in staying with what is felt.
Youvi's painting series:
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Skin-Like Things explores texture and tone without explicit anatomy — intimate, worn, luminous. A raw, instinctive vitality rooted in the self.
- Neti-Neti (meaning “not this, not that”) rejects fixed definitions. Scars become ribbons; wombs bloom into roses. Identity remains open.
Where Youvi and OSUGA Meet
This sensitivity to the body and everyday feeling is where Youvi and OSUGA naturally meet.
Normal Body Magazine Interview
This is what we hopes to offer: not grand statements, but gentle invitations—to live with more feeling, more care, and a little more pleasure woven into the everyday.
