Research Catalogue

This exposition investigates the potential of a/r/tography as a methodological framework within an artistic context characterized by improvisation in movement, dance, and theatre. Through a small-scale exploratory study, theory, practice, and reflection are integrated to examine how knowledge and understanding are generated within and through improvised artistic processes. The exposition includes documentation of practical components, reflective writings, and theoretical perspectives, and illustrates how a/r/tography can operate as a dynamic and responsive research methodology within the field of performative arts.

Physical_Metamorphosis is an artistic research project that explores the body as both subject and space through drawing, photography, and image manipulation. Starting from the study of personal shadows and anatomical forms, the project evolves into an investigation of internal metamorphosis—where the body is reimagined as a layered, dynamic landscape. The artistic process and body of work presented here is divided into three main areas: Inside Metamorphosis, Outside Metamorphosis, and Body Shadows. Inside Metamorphosis explores the inner structures and depths of the human body through clinical imagery, such as gastroscopies and colonoscopies. Outside Metamorphosis, on the other hand, is a process of mechanizing chiaroscuro and the shadows of my own body—elements that are ultimately synthesized in the third and final part, Body Shadows. Body Shadows reflects my direct relationship with photography and highlights its fundamental role in both my artistic research and creative practice.

Surge como objeto tridimensional, como espaço reflexivo e relacionalinter-espécies. Um biombo, que pode nos servir como elemento de separação entre espaços, de privação; quer como um objeto que se articula no espaço, resultando em abrigo, em proteção de quem se encontra dentro, um espaço para meditar, para se co-conectar consigo mesmo, com o outro e com os cinco elementos. (Espaço em construção e exposição metodológica e processual)

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 Master of Photography and Society On 12 May 2008, at 14:28 Beijing time, an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale struck my home province of Sichuan, China, killing 69,227 people, leaving 17,923 missing and injuring 374,643 in various degrees across China. At the time, I was at university in another city far from home. In this thesis, My beginning question is how to fit myself who is absent from this earthquake into its history and the memories shaped by it. As a practitioner and researcher of photographic images, I want to reach out beyond the physical and psychological distance to the real memories of the earthquake understand its impact by describing, speculating and analyzing ready-made images about it and by explaining my own visual strategies, such as making and reworking photographs on this topic. These images contain 1) group photos of local people before the earthquake who were separated from each other in life and death by the it, 2) video clips taken by television camera reporters and other anonymous people on the day of the earthquake, and 3) the visual outcomes produced by people who look at or photograph the earthquake ruins which turned into tourist attractions now. In these ways, I highlight that we can encounter actively that earthquake through dealing with photographs about it and new photographic actions since then, in order to find possibilities to shape the postmemories for those Chinese who, like me, were absent or irrelevant at the time of the earthquake. In September 2022, a new strong earthquake occurred in Sichuan. I regard it as a bridge to relate the 2008 earthquake to present-day China. At that time, China was still in the midst of an extremely rigorous Covid-19 prevention and control phase, with various restrictions trying to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 cascading from the top down. By putting the two earthquakes together to discuss, I argue that Chinese people should remember the disasters of the past so that we can find our place in new dilemmas to deal with them. We should face up to the pain others have experienced and are experiencing and reach out to help, instead of ignoring or avoiding our responsibility. As a Chinese studying an English-taught MA program in the Netherlands, the differences between the Chinese and English contexts, the temporal distance between the current Chinese context and the European historical context were gaps that I could not avoid in this thesis writing. These gaps are reflected by describing and reflecting on my act of going to the former site of the Auschwitz Concentration camp. Acting as a spokesperson, I brought the inappropriate reactions of some Chinese people in the present to the plight of their compatriots to that field of traumatic memories, emphasising the importance of confronting one’s own absence and distance from the disaster from the other’s side.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Photography & Society Using photography as a point of reference, this master thesis explores the political, cultural and scientific structures which allow profit-making with human sickness in the German healthcare system. It is argued how photography — in the form of medical imaging — separates physically representable symptoms from patients and their lived experience, by that creating an abridged representation of life. As healthcare has been deliberately embedded in a profit-oriented market by politicians over the last decades, medical imaging today not only acts as an operational image that gives evidence helping to diagnose a patient, but also as an operational image which facilitates the commodification of the body. This puts the well-being of both patients and medical staff (and therefore society at large) at stake. In the context of this analysis the question arises how photography itself can act as a tool to bring these issues to discussion. Because visual makers themselves deal with the challenge of being part of a profit-oriented system, this demands reexamination of the stories considered worth telling.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 BA Photography My thesis discusses our privacy in the post-digital age where we are surrounded by surveillance cameras that operate by advanced Artificial Intelligence technology and get command from that. The paper begins with an introduction to the concept of "Digital identity" as a contemporary phenomenon used by authorities for the authentication process of people in the virtual world. The thesis clarifies how AI serves and empowers surveillance cameras and how this encounter puts our privacy at stake. Nowadays, most rulers (if not all) misuse this advanced technology in lack of a transparent law in order to monitor individuals in and out of their borders. The discussion ends by demonstrating the role of art and photography in raising awareness, which was one of my main goals for studying this subject in the last year. It also addresses some celebrated contemporary artworks and photo series related to this issue.