Amy Hsu Tzu Chen is a London-based Taiwanese maker, textile artist, and craftivist whose practice reinterprets traditional domestic and vernacular crafts into tactile sculptural forms with malleable, haptic, and sometimes sonic qualities that gently yet insistently invite physical engagement. Drawing on techniques passed down through generations—such as basketry, embroidery, patching, and felting—she reclaims these practices as powerful forms of storytelling, resistance, and social transformation. Her work repositions often overlooked craft traditions as catalysts for cultural change, offering a contemporary lens on their enduring relevance.

Her handcrafting process is rooted in slow, meditative, and seemingly trivial labour that intuitively responds to the remnants of lived human experience. Working with salvaged textile and environmental waste, humble everyday materials, and inherited personal objects, she approaches making as a rhythmic and embodied act. Through this process, she creates abstract, textural, and metaphorical forms that reflect collective emotional and sensory landscapes—shaped by memory, care, and lived experience—transmuting existential fragility into poetic and sensorial embodiments that call for re-imagination.

Central to her practice is participation and human connection. Chen is currently developing tactile and interactive experiences through her work that invite collective gestural movements and non-verbal communication, transforming audiences from passive viewers into active participants. Through these sensorial encounters, she seeks to gently subvert conventional perceptions of craft as passive or decorative, positioning handcrafting as a transformative and resilient force that fosters dialogue, care, and shared experience.