Welcome to the 2026 season premiere of JohnChat. Yu-Hsuan (pen name: Ainsley Chou) is a creator with a deep passion for literature, painting, and imagination. She lives with a rare congenital condition, Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), and has long relied on a powered wheelchair for mobility, with daily living supported by her family.
Relevant information and selected works can be found at:
https://mochifish407.wixsite.com/ainsley-art
https://artogo.co/zh-TW/exhibition/Ainsley
https://www.tba.tw/artists/946
In her academic trajectory, Yu-Hsuan graduated in 2020 from the Department of Special Education at National Taiwan Normal University. Although deeply interested in special education, she encountered significant challenges during her practicum, particularly in addressing students’ complex emotional and behavioral needs, which she felt were difficult to navigate given her relatively limited life experiences. As a result, she decided to shift her academic focus toward the field she felt most passionate about—literature.
She obtained her Master’s degree in Language and Creative Writing from National Taipei University of Education in January 2026. Her master’s thesis, titled Writing Depression in Modern Taiwanese Poetry, examines how persons with disabilities have often been represented in literary works not as subjects in their own right, but rather as narrative devices or metaphors that serve plot development.
Through an analysis of poetic works by writers experiencing depressive symptoms, Yu-Hsuan proposes the concept of “in-betweenness”, exploring how poets continuously traverse and permeate the liminal boundaries between illness (abnormality) and health (normality), as well as between death and life.
Currently, Yu-Hsuan is preparing to pursue doctoral studies, with the aspiration to further excavate and “reclaim” the overlooked fragments of disability literature within literary history, and to develop a scholarly research framework of her own.
--
Hosting provided by
SoundOn 
