Jingyi Du

About

My name is Jingyi Du, and I come from Beijing, China. As a curator shaped by the socio-political context of post-socialist China, I have long been concerned with how images construct our perception and emotions. In an age of information overload and visual saturation, images no longer simply convey meaning—they operate as mechanisms of sensation and governance. My curatorial practice is a critical response to these mechanisms.

During the COVID-19, I was frequently exposed to “Chinese Dreamcore” imagery—nostalgic, foggy suburban scenes marked by emotional dissonance. These images evoked a blurred yet deeply familiar resonance. More than an online aesthetic, they serve as visual symptoms of collective affect, expressing a sense of mourning for a “cancelled future.” As Mark Fisher points out in his theory of “lost futures,” such images grieve not for the past, but for futures that once seemed possible yet have already collapsed.

This mourning is often wrapped in the “safe” language of visual culture, allowing sadness to circulate without triggering structural reflection. My curatorial inquiry begins here: to uncover the emotional logic and institutional frameworks beneath these images, to prompt viewers to re-examine their own perceptual states, and to explore how art might reclaim space for imagination and structural intervention within a repressive and muted system.