Growing up in Taiwan, Tzu-Ju Chen remembers playing with textile scraps under her parents’ sewing table and beachcombing near their coastal village. Her parents were tailors. Her father specialized in the traditional Chinese qipao and her mother made contemporary outfits. Chen watched the construction of both time-honored and modern garments, and gathered shells and stones worn smooth by the ocean. The significance and contrast of these childhood experiences impacted her as an artist deeply invested in temporal and material layers.

After immigrating to the US at fourteen, displacement shaped the way Chen viewed her surroundings. She searched her new environment for points of identity and connection and aspired to fit in with the aesthetic of an adopted culture. At the jeweler’s bench, she found peace. The intimate scale of jewelry and the physical sensation of creating objects with her hands are validation. Metal is the only medium for which she has infinite curiosity and patience.

Syrian composer and clarinetist Kinan Azmeh described finding a sense of home after escaping conflict: “I know my music doesn’t solve any problems, but I hope it brings people hope.” His song “November 22” inspired Chen to reconcile with her own experience of displacement. Inwardly, one constant remains: Chen is freest when she picks up material that evokes a sense of home. The beauty she sees in the material compels her imagination to create. Her work reflects a palimpsest; its gathered layers and materials mark memory, place, and history.