Sabrina Chou ’09

Amongst the cavalcade of colored sneakers and couture eyeglass frames, Sabrina Chou ’09 makes her presence felt with an effortless twist of red fabric.

A Senior VES concentrator living in Quincy, Chou, known to some only as “bow girl,” is currently working on her thesis, entitled “Standard Operating Procedure.” The project explores the reductive nature of the process of production through art. The centerpiece is an exhibit, opening this Thursday in the Sert Café, in which many “toolkits”—symbolizing the standard processes of production in areas from architecture to “toolkit-making”—are on display. They are all stitched between two layers of muslin, however, so that they will never be used. Only the process remains.

The act of putting on her iconic bow every single day joins the ranks of these “standard procedures.” “It’s a subjective standard operating procedure, though, because I choose to apply it to myself. It’s nice to have a uniform,” she says.

Chou started wearing the homemade bow, which covers nearly one whole side of her head, a little over a year ago. The bow is now a legend across campus, especially in Quincy dining hall, where it frequently appears like a glint of cartoon cheeriness peeking into the Harvard milieu; and Chou assures that it is a daily absolute.

“I mean, you don’t leave your house without your pants, do you? Besides, I think my head looks unbalanced without the bow,” she says.

The bow may be the one element of constancy in an artist who is otherwise a paragon of interdisciplinary spirit and multifaceted interest. Chou is interested in fashion; she did a fashion internship one summer in L.A, a good deal of her wardrobe is homemade, and she designs costumes for HRDC. She takes photographs, plays keyboard in a band, is interested in architecture, and is a commercial graphic designer. Seen the Fogg Art Museum’s brochure? It’s hers.

She likes both creating and watching animations as well. Her bow, in fact, was inspired by a character in a Miyazaki animated film named Kiki, a 13-year-old witch-in-training who flies away from home with her talking cat named Jiji and a large red bow.

Indeed, she seems to have as many interests as she has bows on her bow shelf. This year she is taking classes to get her license for ham radio, a type of radio communications popular amongst hobbyists. After graduation, she plans to work in a nanotechnology lab at UCLA.

“I really like tiny, tiny things,” she says, referencing an animation she made about a series of miniature worlds in jars and explaining the apparent discrepancy between cartoons and nanobots. The notion of impassable boundaries between disciplines seems to strike her as absurd, or at least misapplied.

“I think with VES, especially here, you’re able to really learn a lot in other fields, and apply whatever you’re learning or reading or thinking about critically in your art,” she says.

Because of this curious spirit, it seems that the meta-process of her artistic production is anything but a “standard operating procedure.” Take, for example, her “Interactive, Hand-holding, Music-making Vest,” a vest that has buttons which can be pressed to make music, but only when the user holds hands with another vest-wearer. She even varies the “subjective standard operating procedure” of her wardrobe.

“For fancier occasions,” she says, “I’ll wear a bigger bow.”