Jiani Gu

As a Chinese artist navigating Western discourse, I turned to misreading as resistance—questioning systems that demand epistemological fidelity. Within asymmetries of translation, I embrace shanzhai (tactical mimicry and imperfect replication) to challenge dominant frameworks and reclaim agency in spaces of epistemic opacity.

My practice resists the fetishisation of origin and authority by collapsing binaries—such as writing and erasure, expression and suppression—through materials like jade, sandpaper, and pearl. Meaning becomes unstable, misread, and continuously reassembled. Rather than seeking legibility, I explore how mistranslation can be generative: a deconstructive gesture that questions who controls the language through which thought is legitimated.

*In Chinese, "shanzhai" describes a practice of imitation that is neither wholly authentic nor purely counterfeit. as a form of deconstructive creation – an aesthetic and political gesture that critiques centralised authority through strategic copying. It's a way of remixing the original to question who gets to define what's real.