Jiani Gu
Jiani Gu is an interdisciplinary artist based between Hangzhou and London, working across jewelry, objects, and moving image. She holds a BA from the China Academy of Art and is currently studying at the Royal College of Art. Her practice often begins with small, everyday items, constructing narratives that shift between the absurd, the satirical, and the poetic. Through this, she questions the structures of artistic discourse and reflects on the power dynamics embedded in language itself. Her current research focuses on how text and meaning are generated, with particular interest in the entropy and slippages of language within cross-cultural contexts.
My practice explores the unstable relationships between language, material, and cultural translation. As a Chinese artist working within Western theoretical structures, I often feel estranged from the very systems I’m asked to engage. This tension drives me to question how meaning is constructed, who gets to define it, and where it begins to fracture. Through materials like jade, sandpaper, and text, I embrace mistranslation and misreading—not as errors, but as tools of resistance. I’m interested in the spaces where language fails or mutates, and in reclaiming agency within those moments of epistemic uncertainty and semantic collapse.
Project Gallery
