Jes Chen
Jes Chen is a London-based interdisciplinary artist and spatial designer. With a background in architecture and a master’s training in narrative environments, her practice explores the intersection of fiction and space. She works across digital collage, installation, and interactive media to examine institutional power, collective memory, and the emotional economy. Jes currently works as a designer at an architecture studio while actively developing her independent artistic practice.
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.
Project Gallery
