Chou’s Spine at “La Vie en Rose”: broken heart syndrome on show in Paris
By William San, on
On Saturday 26 September 2026, one of my Medsan works was hanging in Paris, at the Hôtel de l’Industrie on place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Chou’s Spine had been selected for “La Vie en Rose”, a contemporary art exhibition organised by Art Paris Project. It is about broken heart syndrome. It is a numbered print, shown in a floater frame.
Art Paris Project describes itself as an art club: it puts on catwalk shows, exhibitions and events that bring art and fashion together. “La Vie en Rose” followed that idea. There was the exhibition during the day, then the shows, then a masked ball in the evening.
The venue matters. The Hôtel de l’Industrie, at 4 place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, is not a hotel you sleep in: it is a hôtel particulier, a Parisian town house, and the seat of the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale. It was in front of this society’s members that Louis and Auguste Lumière projected Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, one of the very first films, on 22 March 1895. I talked about it in a reel before the show, and under the organiser’s post I wrote just one thing: very happy to have been able to exhibit.
What Chou’s Spine shows
A young woman is seen from behind, her hair crowned with red roses. Through her white dress you can see her ribcage and her spine. Roses grow between her ribs, like the flowers no one was ever able to give her, and red ribbons wind around her. For an exhibition called “La Vie en Rose”, a painting covered in roses was a good fit.
Within Medsan, it belongs to a family of five spines, alongside Ayame’s Spine, Sumi Spine, Bonsai Vertebra and Carpal Spine. Each one tells the story of an illness, and this one tells the story of a heart.
Broken heart syndrome is real
You cannot see the heart in the picture. In its place, between the ribs, there are roses. That is where the subject hides.
Broken heart syndrome is not a figure of speech: it is a condition cardiologists call takotsubo cardiomyopathy. After a violent emotional shock, a bereavement for instance, the heart suddenly changes shape. The symptoms look like a heart attack, yet no artery is blocked. It was first described in Japan in 1990, and that is where its name comes from. As it deforms, the left ventricle takes the shape of a takotsubo, the pot Japanese fishermen lower to the seabed to catch octopus: wide at the base, narrow at the neck. It mostly affects women, and in most cases the heart recovers its shape.
A medical truth, a Japanese name, an image you can hang at home: that is what I am after with Medsan.
A print, and what a floater frame is
What hung in Paris is not an original, meaning a one-off piece. Chou’s Spine is a print: an edition signed and numbered by hand, limited to 20 copies per size. The one at “La Vie en Rose” was mounted in a floater frame, what the French call a caisse américaine: a wooden frame in which the stretched canvas sits slightly recessed, with a thin gap all round and no glass in front. The canvas seems to float inside it, and it can be hung as it is.
Chou’s Spine is for sale on med-san.art, with or without a floater frame depending on the size.
