Hi, I am Yuya Zhou,

an author designer whose practice explores life, intimacy, and perception through objects, light, and material experiments.

My practice exists between function and narrative, leaning toward the realm of bodily perception, intimacy, and emotional experience.

Rather than focusing solely on how objects are used, I am interested in how they are sensed, touched, relied upon, and emotionally projected onto. Light, softness, bio-based materials, and the relationship between enclosure and support recur throughout my work—not as stylistic choices, but as outcomes of an ongoing inquiry into states of life, feminine experience, and relational structures.

In the Genesis Series, light becomes a metaphor for fertilization, differentiation, and growth.
The lamps are conceived as incomplete life forms: a soft outer membrane enveloping a firmer inner structure, where protection and constraint coexist. Light diffuses slowly through these layers, held in a state of tension between vulnerability and control. This logic of “softness protecting hardness” reflects my intuitive response to care, maternity, and power dynamics.

Rather than offering conclusions, the work deliberately remains ambiguous and unresolved
fragile in appearance, yet persistent in presence;
quiet and restrained, yet charged through material and detail.

As an author designer, I value long-term research and serial thinking over isolated objects.
My works are developed in chapters, each piece functioning as a fragment within a larger narrative rather than a self-contained product.

Design, for me, is a slow and intimate language.
It does not demand immediate understanding, but quietly gestures toward the body, emotion, and our ways of coexisting with the world.