Jiaqi Zhu
My practice explores emotional attachment, memory, and the ways personal experiences become embedded in everyday objects.
Working primarily with textiles, soft sculpture and installation, I am interested in how familiar materials can accumulate emotional weight through repeated contact, care and memory. My recent work focuses on attachment objects and the emotional relationships that develop between people and the objects they live with.
Through tactile forms, irregular hand-sewn surfaces and altered familiar objects, my work explores the shifting boundaries between object and companion, comfort and burden, familiarity and transformation.
ABEBE
ABEBE, 2026
Soft sculpture / installation
Second-hand textiles, thread, buttons and stuffing
225 × 80 × 80 cm
ABEBE explores emotional attachment and the ways an attachment object can accumulate emotional weight over time. Developed from my ongoing relationship with my own attachment object, the work considers how memory, care and continued attachment can gradually transform the meaning and form of a familiar object.
Made primarily from second-hand textiles, individual soft forms are sewn, stuffed and brought together through repetition and accumulation. Familiar features multiply and merge into a larger sculptural form, shifting between an attachment object, a body and an organism.
Suspended within the space, ABEBE extends vertically while parts of the sculpture reach the floor, allowing the work to be encountered from different angles. The work translates emotional accumulation into material, form and space, while retaining traces of familiarity, memory and care.
ABEBE, 2026. Installation view from another angle.
ABEBE, 2026. Installation view.
ABEBE, 2026. Detail.
ABEBE, 2026. Detail.
ABEBE, 2026. Small textile object presented in front of the installation.
ABEBE, 2026. Installation view from another angle.
ABEBE, 2026. Detail of the lower section.
ABEBE, 2026. Detail of the lower section.
ABEBE, 2026. Detail.