The Yellow Chair Tracing Color through Memory, Pigment, and Material Practice
(2026)

This thesis investigates how relationships between color and emotion can be understood beyond frameworks that assign fixed meanings to color. Beginning with a personal memory of a yellow chair, the research explores how color acquires significance through perception, memory, material engagement, and cultural context. Combining theoretical inquiry, participatory workshops, natural pigment-making, and hand-painted animation, the project examines both the possibilities and limitations of color-emotion
mapping systems.
The thesis is structured through the stages of lake pigment making—gathering, extraction, precipitation, sedimentation, drying, grinding, and tempering—which function as both material procedures and conceptual lenses. Through these stages, color is explored not only as a visual phenomenon but also as a
material, historical, and relational process.
The findings suggest that emotional meanings do not reside within colors themselves but emerge through relationships among materials, bodies, memories, environments, histories, and forms of attention.