University of Oxford | Cognitive Art History as New Humanities: How to Capture a Painter’s Brain?

It is rare for an artist to paint her own brain. Yet Irene Chou (1924–2011), a leading Hong Kong ink painter, did just that. When confronted with the X-ray that confirmed her diagnosis of cerebellar atrophy, Chou saw her life inscribed within it: “I saw vital images of tree branches … that is life—my life.”

Her artistic engagement with trees had begun decades earlier. In the secluded forests of Hong Kong, she obsessively sketched “ten thousand trees,” a practice that became both a psychological necessity and a means of imposing order on overwhelming inner turmoil. Her later work connected these outward forms with the vascular and neural patterns revealed in medical images of her brain.

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