Issue 4: Metabolizer↓
Introduction by Ling Siaw Lyn →
Foreword by Owen Herbert →
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When the Moon Holds Our Loneliness
My writing explores explores how empty landscapes and moonlight create spaces for contemplating modern solitude and emotional connection.
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Through the Window: Looking at London
This video essay explores the city of London through the frames that shape how we see it, especially its windows.
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The Window and Its Veil: Drawing the Dialogue of the Inside and Outside
This essay explores the inbetween state through the domestic window grill, analyzing it as a paradoxical boundary, threshold, and portal to affirm liminal fluidity.
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The Materiality of Touch: A Haptic Encounter with an Object
A description of a haptic encounter with an object in a way which critically and imaginatively examines touch as an embodied and material process. Drawing on a material language from writers such as Derrida and Merleau-Ponty, touch is vividly defined as a fundamental hinge between us, the subject, and the objective world.
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The Human Condition Through Non-Human Eyes
An essay exploring the use of non-human metaphors in literature to illuminate psychology and my painting practice.
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Reflection: The Concept of “Home” from the Perspective of Loss
In this essay I reflect on my process and the thematic of home.
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Problems of Art and Artificial Nature
Two essays, one exploring the problems that have sprung from the commodification of art. The other dealing with arts relation to nature. Both trying to use a Marxist and Hegelian lens.
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Painting as an Extension of the Self
This text presents my reflection on my own painting experience, discussing what draws me in during the process of painting and why I resist excessive interpretation of my work.
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Material Dialogues: Reflection, Chance and Perception in Expanded Painting
An exploration of expanded painting. This essay examines how material agency, embodied perception, and chance operations transform painting into an ecological practice.
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Interfacial Ecologies: On Bark, Bodies, and Bandwidth
The essay explores how natural and digital “skins” act as responsive surfaces that store memory and shape interaction. Through installations that merge bark, skin and glitching textures, my practice explores slower, attentive forms of touch and the ethical relationships that arise when organic and technological rhythms meet.
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In-Between: Painting the Energies of Translation
This essay examines my position as someone in-between Bai culture—neither fully inside nor outside. Using Fei Xiaotong’s concept of “field,” I explore how this in-between state shapes my relationship with cultural identity.
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From Representation to Expression: Constructing Emotional Experience in Un-Rotted Bloom
My creative practice has always revolved around one central question: how can emotion be expressed rather than merely represented? When I first began learning painting, I used to believe that expression meant the visualisation of emotion. This assumption is still visible in my earlier works. Whether abstract or figurative, all of them were guided by…
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Emotional Support Shampoo
This video essay explores the depth of my practice, focusing on authenticity, everyday life as a source of reference, and the intimacy found in ordinary moments.
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Echoes of the Ancestral Land
This video work explores how my Indigenous identity intersects with my upbringing in the city. Through layered images, sound, and abstract visual rhythms, the piece investigates how memory and cultural distance can be reconstructed through moving image.
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Building My Own Haven
Exploring how painting transforms psychological distance into the language of urban emotion.
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Absurdity as Artistic Strategy: Re-activating Bodily Perception
An essay examining how absurdity, as an artistic strategy, reawakens perception and reframes seeing and being seen in overlooked everyday actions.
Issue 3: Unresolve ↓
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A Drop of the Unknown: Creating emptiness in printmaking
This essay pursues invisible existence, exploring emptiness through an experimental approach in the materiality of printmaking and subject transformation.
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Crowds, us
This essay explores societal isolation and invisible boundaries through illusionary spaces and figures, reflecting the collective impact of social divisions within broader structures.
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Diphylleia grayi: In-between
A reflection on thresholds through an intertwined practice of drawing and embroidery, exploring the relationship between line, body, intimacy and existence.
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Exchange Dialogues: Navigating Cross-Cultural Spiritual Pathways in Art
This essay reflects on my interview with artist Yin-Ju Chen, exploring the topics of cross-cultural art practice, shamanism, identity and AI, and the role of spirituality in contemporary contexts.
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Expressing Mother-daughter Relationship Through Installation Photography
This essay discusses the harm I suffered in the mother-daughter relationship based on the way my mother and I got along in the past as I created my work.
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Human and Nature: Rebirth, repair and new symbiosis
This essay explores the interconnectedness of life, death, nature, and pollution, examining how symbiosis in the Anthropocene reflects human impact on the environment.
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Interactive Narrativity in The Context of Participatory Arts and Power
This thesis investigates how interactive narrativity within participatory arts can challenge societal power structures and foster social change, drawing upon both theoretical insights and my own practice-based research.
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Modern Influences on Human-Animal Interactions
An exploration of how technology, climate change, urbanization, and media reshape human-animal relationships, ethical responsibilities, and societal roles toward animals and the environment.
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Modern Ruins
Reflections on sculptural practice-as-research through the latter half of 2024, and my rediscovery of ‘autoethnography’. This project began in the notion of ‘monumentality’.
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Polyphony of Ashes and Words: Whispers of Existence
This essay explores the intersections of culture, identity, and materiality in contemporary art through poetic reflections and installations inspired by modular structures, ephemeral materials, and dual cultural experiences.
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Presence and Absence
This podcast explores the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, focusing on love’s expression, cultural influences, and emotional dynamics.
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Sublime, Creating Environment for Meditative Calm and Encountering Landscape
This essay reflects my research on encountering landscapes, creating an environment for meditative calm and the idea of sublime.
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Tracing a Subtle Feedback
This reflection on painting reexamines the process of observation as an active form of interaction. It is supported by theories on perception, Art Therapy, and raises an inquiry on the categorical distinctions between symbolic dialogue and social practice.
Issue 2: Making Conversation ↓
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Installation and Fictioning for Engagement, Social Justice, and Change.
This essay discusses why the ‘artistic interventions’ of installation, and ‘fictioning’ are particularly suitable when the work is underpinned by social justice concerns and has the aim of engaging dialogue for change.
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Women Of The NHS
These podcasts reflect my recent collaboration with Women of the NHS. This podcast is all about celebrating and collaborating with Women of the NHS, from a variety of backgrounds and roles within the NHS. I am excited to be interviewing and working with Women in various stages of their careers and across different sectors of…
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The Transfer of “Self-Consciousness”
This paper focuses on the flow of people’s selves into digital space as the times have moved on, and reflects on the implications of this for millennials’ self-understanding as well as suggesting new ways of thinking about it.
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Limitations and Possibilities in the Dialogue between Art and Gaming
This essay delves into the intricate relationship between art and games, critically examining their intersections, conflicts, and symbiosis in aesthetics, culture, and technology. It seeks to explore additional possibilities through a reflective approach.
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The Fundamentally Flawed Quality of a Painting
Tom is a neo-expressionist painter based in London studying an MA in painting at UAL: Camberwell. In Tom’s essay he will discuss the political economy of the modern art market.
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A Reflection on Industrialism in Photographic Image Production
This essay explores the production process of photographic images influenced by the technological and industrial mechanism, while reflecting on alternatives to deal with the redundancy in image viewing.
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The concept of family equality in modern society
This essay combines author articles, sociological research, and personal experiences with numerous sociological papers to investigate the author’s perspectives on their upbringing.
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Feme Covert
This essay explores the stories of wives eclipsed from history. Documenting how using feminist historiography and storytelling within my practice can make these absent lives visible and provide us with alternative histories.
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The Art of Imagery in Drawing: Landscape of Memory
This essay discusses my research on the art of imagery in the creation of drawings, which is combined with examples of artworks and my personal artistic practice to discuss the influence of landscape, imagery, and picturesque concepts on my creative thinking.
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There is an ocean between you and me
An essay discussing how artists and audiences rely on works of art to complete invisible conversations.
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Engaging, Bridging and Addressing
A wide range of discussion about what and how social documentary is being reflected through the practice of traditional and extended printmaking, which involves the aspects of concept development, critical reflection, technique employment and so on.
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On the Exploration and Development of Contemporary Artists in the Field of Cosmology
I hope that through this essay to let the readers and viewers feel the contemporary art in the field of cosmology shine.
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Unnatural Distinction
This essay explores the decline of ecosystems in the post-human era, outlines the author’s artistic practice during the MA, accessing digital technology to create a series of scenic fragments about ecological crisis.
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We are the same, we are different.
Jing Pu and Meng Xu discuss their family relationships. We explore the different ways in which single-child families and multi-child families handle the same thing and how this affects personality.
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We are the same, we are different.
Meng Xu and Jing Pu discuss their family relationships. We explored the different ways in which single-child families and multi-child families handle the same thing and how this affects personality.
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Split Bodies: The Construction of Women’s Character in Otaku Culture
This paper describes contemporary subcultural traits and reflects on the impact of East Asian otaku culture’s stereotypical construction of the female figure in online animation on the virtual body and the real physical body.
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Self-expression: Revisit narrative landscape painting
The essay traces my artistic evolution from realistic painting under socialist realism to a quest for artistic freedom and primarily explores the possibility of transcending the constraints of national ideology in my personal landscape paintings, aiming for self-expression. It also critically analyzes and attempts to philosophically position my painting practice based on Adorno aesthetic theories.
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On Memory
Exploring the possibility of preserving memory and containing emotion in the face of loss and grief
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Kitkats and Cuppas
A reflection on points of connection in developing practices over the course of the MA and the collaborations that resulted.
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Harmony of Verse and Mind
The study explores into the collaboration between humans and machines, exploring how they creativity come together to make interactive art in the fields of poetry language and neuroscience. By connecting these different areas, the goal is to discover new ways of artistic expression.
Issue 1: Research Festival ↓
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Feminist Art in Digital Space
A talk and an essay about my research about re-architecting female‘s daily life in the digital space through performance, and using 3D cyborg to perform instead of live-action performance.
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The possibility of Software as life in Capitalist Ruins
Myths in digital practice: the art of self-presentation under digitalized society and the possibility of software as a kind of memory of human symbiosis.
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The Importance of Touch: Rubbing, Printmaking and the Expanded Field of Drawing in my Practice
This essay will discuss my research into touch as a means of exploring the world. It will talk about my practice in relation to rubbing, casting, imprints and printmaking in the expanded field of drawing.
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Depicting Impermanence
A discussion on the conceptual idea and various means of depicting time in contemporary art and the artist’s own practice
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Bad painting appear as a phenomena
Taking “bad painting” as the phenomenon, this paper probes into my artistic methodology.
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Red Dots, Entropy, and Syntax
in the Textual Shoes of Sandor Krasna1 1 The name of the fictitious cameraman whose imaginary letters read by a female narrator constitute the narration of the film ‘Sans Soleil’ (1983) by Chris Marker. Part 1. Parting of Ways When we were animals, we existed in chaos of nature. The world surrounding us posed dangers…
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The body in the in-between – painting the glitched body
This essay highlights different approaches to translate the body into the digital space and reflects on how this affects our understanding of this body.
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AROUND ABOUT
Multiplicity of bodies in the space between subject and object. Sphere as allegory for an existence between internal and external, in and out. The body as globe, ball, orb, bubble, foam, etc.
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Happy Death Day: Revisiting Feminism in Abortion in the Chinese Context
The artist seeks to explore a new perspective on abortion based on feminism. By making it possible for a wider audience to participate in the search for a new perspective on abortion, the patriarchy’s devaluation and natural stigmatisation of women who have had abortions can be dismantled.
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A conversation about reincarnation
Jingyu Niu and Yifei Sun discuss their research on personal secrets and the Buddhist realm. They explore confessions of past experiences, negative emotions, struggles with desires, reincarnation and future lives.
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tbc
A record of immediate thoughts on the author’s own works, creative process and art from a first-person perspective; reflects on the art and artworks that the author has seen and heard with one’s consciousness which carries the author’s subjective recognition.
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The connection between people and objects
For some people, objects are always given some special meaning. These objects can be people’s friends, can be a container that hold people’s memories, or can be a symbol that represent someone.
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Painting as a returning object
This article discusses the history of object returns, and how painting, as an object both shaped and participating in the shaping of the creator’s actions, becomes a visual representation of the tension between subject and object.
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How my paintings rebels the era of mass media and digital communication.
This essay, in the tone of a practice report, outlines the author’s artistic practice during the MA, discussing how painting was used as a weapon to resist the late capitalist, consumer, image-infested era.
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Digital Religion Bible
For the research festival, I wrote a book based on my central topic — the Bible of Digital religion. I hope that by spreading this Digital Religion Bible, more people can learn about digital religion.
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Memories of the Motherland
Video essay discussing the development of my practice through research, with personal footage filmed in Iran and documentation of my painting practice.
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Spirituality and Poetry in Painting
An essay analysing the role of spirituality and poetry in my own painting practice and other artists’ works.
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Comfort home in games online: When play is not just about fun
An essay discussing about the game. When games are not only just screen activities for enjoyment. Point out new context that games can take. Connect people with a sense of home.
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Performance as gentle resistance
This article will analyse performance art as a gentle rebellion and messages of noncooperation from the artworks by artists and non-artists.
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Reconstructing witches in feminism
A self-interview about my research and practice in reconstructing witches under a feminist context. Here I will discuss artists, poetry, films, operas, dances and podcasts that influenced me.
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Analysis of the current situation of environmental artists
This essay proposes the idea of recycling creative consciousness, combined with the creation of personal environmental art works for analysis.
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A Conversation about Reincarnation
Yifei Sun and Jingyu Niu discuss their research on personal secrets and the Buddhist realm. They explore confessions of past experiences, negative emotions, struggles with desires, reincarnation and future lives.
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The uncanny in three-dimensional works
An essay discussing three-dimensional work created under the influence of Donald Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’.
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Yearning for the idealised past
An essay analysing the concept of the past, nostalgia and memory.
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TADO Art Center – London Short Film Festival
TLSFF is an online community platform for young creators to show their talents, advance their careers, find partners to share their lives and gather their ideas.