During my undergraduate studies in design, my exploration of visuality often intersected with issues beyond the aesthetic, such as the cultural considerations when creating works. My graduation project, for instance, analysed the ethical implications of symbols used in the social representation of domestic violence in China, such as posters and advertisements. Explicit symbols such as bruises are intended to evoke social memories of domestic violence, but their indiscriminate use can amount to ‘visual violence’, creating a collective ‘gaze’ that objectifies victims. While this gaze is part of a historically constructed visual memory, reproducing it through design risks further marginalising the perpetrators. My project juxtaposed the ‘perpetrator-victim’ relationship with the ‘observer-observed’ relationship in exhibition contexts. I used thermochromic installation to transfer the agency of bruise formation to the audience, encouraging reflection on the ethical responsibility in representations of violence.

I further explored the relationship between memory and culture in a master’s programme at Tsinghua University, where I designed in both urban and rural public spaces, enriched my fieldwork skills and deepened my interest in anthropology. In my first year, I worked in a partially redeveloped urban village in Shenzhen, addressing cultural conflicts among commercial consumers, indigenous villagers, and migrant workers by navigating government regulations and fostering intercultural communication. It led me to a deeper appreciation of the political dimensions of critical memory, as captured in Pierre Nora’s claim that, memory is a site of political struggle. In response to the erasure of ordinary individuals’ memories under state-driven narratives, I led a course team to design a gamified app, using designed bracelet for offline exploration, meanwhile activating character memories on app interface, to ease tensions between conflicts.

Throughout my studies in design, I read widely in sociology and anthropology. This reading influenced my curatorial projects in the community: I gradually draw on insights from phenomenological sociology and visual anthropology. In the Beijing Jieshan Urban Regeneration Exhibition, for instance, I explored how sensory and temporal experiences influence life in an ageing community. My fieldwork revealed that the life trajectories of the community members had given rise to a cultural construct based on shared memories of vision, touch, or sound. Attempting to convey this in an exhibition context, however, risked creating cultural closure. Hence, to make these sensory experiences accessible, my installation used a ‘person-object-environment’ narrative structure to help the audience situate the items displayed within the context of the surrounding life.

In my master’s graduation project, I applied my accumulated research experiences to the topic of family memory. I conducted an auto-ethnographic study of my own habits relating to collection and storage, guided by Paul Connerton’s view that social memory is transmitted through bodily practices and material culture. This led me to a visual study of domestic storage as a memory space. As well as morphing over time, the memories associated with a given object depend on where they are placed in the home. This creates an overlapping form of memory that manifests as both temporal sequence and spatial typology. I applied this to the structural redesign of guidebooks, which made me recommended for Milan Design Week. This project shaped my doctoral research on the cultural significance of storage and collection in the ‘family museum’—an extended concept that incorporates domestic objects into curation narratives. I aim to find how somatic memories grounded in spaces and objects are constructed through kinship and generational transmission.