LONDON.- In London’s contemporary art scene, Chinese artist Jiayi is redefining the boundaries of perception by using the scanner as a paintbrush. A graduate of the London College of Communication and the Royal College of Art, the artist transforms cold industrial equipment into a medium for recording body temperature - the moment her cheek touches the scanner’s glass panel, the technological tool becomes an extension of her skin.

Unlike the spectatorial gesture of traditional photography, Jiayi’s creations always carry a certain sacrificial intimacy. She uses her body as a stamp, leaving behind proof of her existence in the process of digitisation: the flattened senses are transformed into flowing topological maps, the palm prints are cracked into geological specimens in mechanical reading, and those dander and sweat stains that are invisible in daily contact are developed into miniature monuments at a resolution of 300dpi. This active self-objectification makes each frame a tactile fossil - at once warm with breath and solidified with digital detachment.

’My scanner is a blind photographer,’ is how Jiayi once described her creations. When the visually dominant logic of viewing is replaced by the sense of touch, images are no longer slices of the world, but become maps of pressure, topographies of time. The viewer is forced to face a paradoxical experience: those pores, distorted by excessive closeness, instead produce a dizzying sense of remoteness when enlarged to wall size. This dislocation of the senses is her metaphor for intimacy in the digital age - we long for connection, but are always separated by a layer of glass.

In recent years, her practice has been pushing the boundaries of the flat surface. In her latest immersive installation, the low-frequency hum of a scanner is transformed into a spatial soundscape, where the viewer’s shadow is optically superimposed on a pre-recorded body scan. This multi-sensory ’co-touch’ experience may be the ultimate form she seeks: when the physical boundaries of the artwork 、