by Jose Villarreal
How the Chinese-born, UK-based artist turns scanners into sites of memory, grief, and queer embodiment.
In an era increasingly defined by digital opacity and algorithmic velocity, Jiayi Yu offers a rigorous and intimate counterpractice—one that privileges texture over speed, memory over spectacle, and presence over representation. Her practice, born of diasporic experience and shaped by UK-based artistic and academic training, positions the scanner not as a tool of reproduction but as an affective interface. In her work, the flatbed scanner becomes a tactile archive: a way of recording breath, pressure, and the residual energies of the body. Through a methodology she calls "sensory translation," Yu builds a new grammar of touch, one rooted in queer phenomenology and posthuman materialism.
Her breakthrough series Touch Me (2021–24) marks a decisive point in this trajectory. Comprised of layered, distorted scans of bodily contact, these works dismantle the camera’s optical hierarchy. In their place, we are offered compressions, glitches, shadows, and smears—textures that signify not the surface of the body, but its passage. These images are temporal rather than spatial; affective rather than descriptive. Flesh becomes information, and the scanner becomes an emotional seismograph. The result is not a portrait but an invocation: each piece is an index of absence, longing, or loss, a refusal of the image’s historic burden to clarify or contain.
Touch Me has been widely discussed in curatorial circles for its radical approach to digital intimacy. In contrast to the dominant modes of hyper-visibility and self-surveillance that govern both social media and contemporary photography, Yu’s work offers a quiet rebellion: a rethinking of what it means to be seen, or to leave a trace. Her images don’t claim to represent bodies. They allow bodies to speak through what they’ve touched.
This visual and conceptual framework is extended in her future solo exhibition of INVISIBLE, a work originally created in 2021 but reconfigured as a video-slice installation for the group show Urban Scream at Graffik Gallery London. Here, Yu blends blurred text, fragmented facial scans, and urban visual debris to produce what one critic called “a scanner-based ruin.” The work reads as a meditation on the erasure of queer and migrant bodies from urban memory—how the city forgets what it cannot categorize. The piece’s stillness becomes its force: rather than shout, it lingers. Rather than depict, it absorbs. In this way, INVISIBLE is not only an artwork but a politics of visibility rendered in quiet code.
Yu’s aesthetic commitment is matched by her intellectual coherence. Trained at the Royal College of Art and London College of Communication, her education in the UK shaped her distinctive synthesis of conceptual media, somatic practice, and research-led image-making. Her exhibitions—including the Cannes Art Series, Order and Chaos, Concrete Poetry LA, and her upcoming solo show CHAO—demonstrate a consistent formal innovation grounded in embodied theory. Notably, her forthcoming solo project with Art by Safri—set to open in 2025—will combine time-lapsed scanner imaging with sonic recordings of queer Asian diasporic memory. This work, like her others, is not about visibility alone—it is about sensory survival.
What distinguishes Jiayi Yu’s practice is its resistance to simplification. In a cultural moment saturated with performative identity and optical excess, she offers a different paradigm: slow images, coded touch, fragmentary archives. She does not illustrate identity; she corrodes its borders. Her work does not fit into existing categories—it asks why those categories exist at all. In this way, Yu is not simply participating in contemporary discourse—she is redrawing its terrain.
The United Kingdom is not simply where Yu studied; it is where her artistic voice emerged, found shape, and continues to evolve. The country’s emphasis on interdisciplinary research, institutional critique, and socially responsive art-making provides a critical context for her practice. Institutions like the RCA and spaces like Tate’s “Late at” programmes have nurtured the very methods she now applies globally. The UK’s art ecosystem—with its growing interest in neurodiversity, queer aesthetics, and postcolonial media—is uniquely suited to foster the next phase of her work. Her contributions, in turn, reflect and reinforce the UK’s position at the forefront of conceptual and critical visual culture.
To engage with Jiayi Yu’s scanner-based practice is to confront the limits of vision, the politics of digital residue, and the possibility of affect as medium. In her work, we do not simply look—we encounter. We trace. We feel what’s no longer there.
She is not only an artist of aesthetic interest, but one of theoretical consequence. Yu’s practice speaks urgently to curators, theorists, and institutions alike: what can visual culture become if we allow it to remember differently?
