✍️ assessment2

TLDR: Systems & Body

how the body is disciplined by systems, and how we react
Before joining XPUB, I worked as an editor for a government-funded art curation agency in Southern China. My role spanned branding, copywriting, and radio show planning. This experience made me deeply reflective about the relationship between systems, body, collectivity, and individuality.

Throughout my time at XPUB, I've explored one recurring theme across all three Special Issues:

That is for a good reason! I aim to find the cracks, the glitches, the moments where we can insert our own meanings.

🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷

SI#25 - Broadcast: Invisible Discipline

In SI25, We used sound as a tool to explore invisible discipline. Sound, like call center scripts, is repetitive and systemic. By editing and transforming these soundscapes, I aimed to create moments of agency.

SI25 Broadcast 3: Underwater Exploration

Field recording as a tool

Curated a sonic collection of diverse water-related audio samples to investigate the textures of aquatic environments. When water became a metaphor, we had so much room to imagine and discover a visible system. Without discussion, we use an improvisation way to edit and collage them in Radio Worm.

• 

  Collaborative script reading

• 

  Audio devices

SI25 Broadcast 5: Protocols For Bad Customer Service

Script as Narrative Space

Bad Customer Service Scripts

Sound, like call center scripts, is repetitive and systemic—it shapes behavior in ways we don't always recognize.

This project investigated how the rigid scripts of service labor can be subverted to tell personal stories. We developed a script exploring the potential of customer service protocols as an unconventional narrative space.

Worm Radio: Chinese Artistic Labor

Poster of the radio show

After this exploration, I created a radio show prototype examining Chinese artistic labor—the intersection of creative work and systemic pressure.

This piece was broadcast on Worm Radio, questioning: how do artists survive when their labor is both creative and constrained? It explored themes of algorithmic intrusion and the laborer's escape from high-pressure artistic environments.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SI#26 - Face Notation

Face Notation is an interactive website inspired by Chinese physiognomy (face-reading) and web design. I noticed how CSS elements move and shift when you resize a browser window—just like how facial features supposedly determine destiny in traditional face-reading logic.

Face Notation prototype: Interactive face puzzle

The project allows users to compose music with their own faces: a way of reclaiming the body from systemic definition. By turning the face into a musical instrument, I question:

"Who has the power to define what our bodies mean?"

In Chinese physiognomy, every mole, every line, every feature carries meaning assigned by tradition. But what if we could reassign that meaning? What if the system of interpretation became playful, collaborative, musical?

SI#27 - Observer Clock

Observer Clock is an installation that links blinking to the flow of time.

"Every blink counts. The more you blink, the faster the clock runs."

This work reflects my experience in service jobs where attention itself becomes labor. When your job is to watch, to monitor, to pay attention—your body's unconscious actions become part of the work.

• 

  Observer Clock: Installation view showing the clock interface

• 

  Documentation booklet explaining the concept

• 

  Detail: Eye-tracking mechanism and clock display

The central question: If attention creates value and shifts time, what do we truly desire from our bodies and technologies? Are we observers of time, or is time observing us?

External Works & Workshops

Drifting Down to the Nearby

Co-authored a writing project documenting the nuanced life experiences and the concept of the "nearby" through the lens of an immigrant in the Netherlands.

Workshops @ Garage Rotterdam

Language(s) :KABK x PZI Alumni Exhibition

Presenting Workshop: "Face Notation / From Face-Reading to Personal Soundscapes". In this 90-minute workshop, participants used Chinese mole-reading traditions to create music. Each person's face became a score, each feature a note—reclaiming the body from predetermined meanings.

Graduation Proposal: 𝒫lans

My creative practice is evolving toward more participatory performance and interactive workshops.

Prototype:

• Bladder Runner Field Diary: A visual and textual field diary that employs the bladder as a metaphor to translate visceral bodily experiences from field research in Shenzhen.
• Mundane Spiritual Interface Mapping: Designed an interactive survey website to collect and map individual "spiritual geographies," visualizing the mundane technologies people utilize during states of exhaustion.

Future: I aim to deepen the intersection of programming, sound, and body while exploring new modes of engagement with audiences as active co-creators.

Clark’s proposition Estruturas vivas (Live structures, 1969)

♡ THANK YOU ♡