BIOGRAPHY
Delia Hou is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York, working in abstract oil painting alongside performance, sculpture, and digital media (NFTs, video, and photography under the pseudonym Plastiqu33n). Her recent paintings investigate atmosphere, ambiguity, and perceptual embodiment through layered color and softened edges. Her practice is shaped by her diverse background in astrophysics at MIT, law at NYU and Silicon Valley, and tango dance, as well as living across the USA, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Argentina.
Her arts education includes and at the Art Students League in New York, and Proyecto PAC, MANGLAR, and sculpture with Miguel Harte in Argentina. She has participated in group exhibitions in Argentina from 2022 to 2026 in the final group show of the arts programs Proyecto PAC and Manglar, La Gran Paternal in Casa Marte, El Maldonado, and Museum of Fine Arts Manuel Belgrado. Her dance films have been selected and awarded in festivals such as Screen Dance International, Lady Filmmakers Festival, and International Fine Arts Film Festival. Her NFT work is published in 100 Womxn Artists to Follow in the NFT Space by Grxls Revolution. In 2023, she founded El Lobby, Center for Artistic Production and Thought, hosting three artist studios, three exhibition rooms, and space for visiting residencies in Buenos Aires, right in front of the opera house Teatro Colon.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work stems from a hyper-awareness of the subtle contradictions present in everyday life. The need to question the banal and seek beauty in both the mundane and the magnificent comes from having moved between the United States, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Argentina, and between fields often treated as separate: astrophysics, law, dance, performance, and contemporary art. Across these seemingly disparate movements, I have come to understand paradox not as a problem to resolve, but as an universal, generative condition. Using aesthetics as a tactic of refinement, I hone in on peculiar universalities in a world of cultural and class differences. This final destination as a multidisciplinary artist gives me a space expansive and ambiguous enough to hold the many tensions I recognize in life: seduction and violence, discipline and excess, identity and artifice, the body and the systems that name and regulate it.
In performance, sculpture, and digital media, I approach these tensions outwardly and explicitly. Humor, absurdity, and irony allow me to approach systems of power obliquely, implicating the viewer in questioning common assumptions. I transform recognizable objects, rituals, and social gestures (including, for example, religious confession, political protest, and cultural ceremony) into situations that are simultaneously alluring and grotesque. I use beauty and familiarity as both seduction and trap. The work both attracts and repels, drawing the viewer through the contradictions it stages, until common meaning becomes unstable. Performance and the object thus become a method for testing how meaning is produced between the body, the viewer, and the social roles we inherit. The body becomes a site where consumption and pollution, devotion and spectacle, intimacy and control collapse into one another. Rather than offering fixed meaning, I create situations in which meaning slips, multiplies, and resists control.
My most recent body of work, which I call No-edge Painting, explores these tensions implicitly through abstract oil painting. Instead of asserting hard form, I allow sensation to emerge through tonal relations, collapsing color, and softened edges. These paintings privilege ambiguity over definition. Instead of signalling to specific symbols containing paradoxes, they are fields in which paradox can be felt through a purely visual experience.
Modern physics has moved away from the certainty of discrete objects toward fields, probabilities, and relational systems. Likewise, lived experience today is shaped by migration, digital circulation, cultural translation, and overlapping systems of meaning. Rigid boundaries increasingly fail to describe how identity, memory, and perception are formed. My paintings respond to this condition through fluidity, atmosphere, and formal restraint, while my performance-based work uses the body, humor, and visceral experience to challenge the categories we unconsciously reinforce.
Across mediums, my practice asks how beauty can destabilize certainty and how abstraction can hold contradiction.