Jes Chen
The Learning Market emerged from a personal process of intuitive construction during a time of social upheaval.
First inspired by improvised bartering systems that took shape during the 2022 Shanghai lockdown, the work reimagines learning as a form of survival-based exchange—messy, urgent, and deeply human. Developed without formal training in design or data visualisation, the piece assembles fragments of found knowledge into a modular visual system, shaped by instinct and emotional necessity.
Through layered collage, adaptive grids, and speculative cartographies, the work resists institutional order and embraces the hopeful chaos of self-education. It stands as both structural experiment and emotional archive: a living framework for navigating fragmented knowledge in an overwhelming information landscape. This is not a polished academic artefact, but a map of how learning feels when built from the ground up—tactile, improvised, and in constant motion.
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