TOUCH ME

19/04/2025-30/4/2025

She has not been here 2025

Photo by Luan gallery

Within the fluid cartography of contemporary art in London, Yu Jiayi is quietly intervening in the digital image power structure through an “invisible bodily language.” Her practice seeks to challenge the technical-political mechanisms constituted by image generation, storage, transmission, interpretation, and control—mechanisms that together exert pressure on marginalized bodies. This addresses a series of urgent issues in contemporary society: which marginalized bodies are allowed to be seen, how they are seen, why they are seen, and by whom they are controlled or repurposed. In her recent exhibition TOUCH ME at LUAN Gallery, Jiayi systematically engages with these pressing questions.

Starting from the technical logic of “camera-less photography,” Jiayi turns to media critique to transform “archival tools” into “anti-archival tools.” Her tools are not about spectacle—they are neither AR nor AI—but rather a most ordinary office scanner, the kind typically used for copying, filing, or clerical tasks. In her hands, it becomes a medium for perceptual reshaping. She refers to this non-typical image-producing device as the blind photographer, using it to question normative visual regimes.

Born in China and a graduate of both the London College of Communication (LCC) and the Royal College of Art (RCA), Jiayi positions herself within the liminal zone “between touch and vision.” She is neither a traditional photographic artist nor does she wish to be confined within the category of “new media.” Her scanned images often arise from the silent pressure of the body against the glass surface—cheeks, palm lines, skin flakes, sweat—captured as residual traces of existence when digitally magnified. She describes this process as an “intimate self-objectification,” in which every pixel carries an unspoken sensory afterimage.

Yet it is precisely within these “private” images that Jiayi constructs a perceptual paradox rich in political meaning. The body is no longer merely the object of vision but the site of image genesis. She establishes a strategy of tactile imagery. She never narrates stories directly, never marks identity labels, never writes any explicitly queer narrative—yet each of her frames seems to speak of a “repressed but undeniable intimacy”: unacknowledged, untouched, and disallowed relationships. This treatment lends her work a blurred yet intense erotic tension, constantly leading the viewer into temptation, interruption, and seduction once more.

She once wrote, “My scanner is a blind photographer.” The key to this statement lies not in the “blindness” but in the reconstruction of the identity of the photographer. Traditional photography relies on optical perspective, framing logic, and the visual regime of subject-object separation. In contrast, the scanner’s working mode—slow, close, unfocused—disrupts visual dominance. The body is no longer merely viewed, but becomes the precondition of the image’s occurrence. This is a strategy of visual language that seeks ambiguity and produces “unrecognizability” as a means of evading power structures. It is this strategic blurring of the boundary between “viewing” and “being viewed” that renders Jiayi’s work formally gentle but sharply media-critical.

Yet within this softness, the limitations of the work begin to surface. Critically speaking, Jiayi’s current scanner-based practice still largely remains at the level of visualizing sensual experience. She uses media to produce intimacy but has not yet fully revealed the scanner’s systemic control—as in, how it determines what is recorded and what is discarded, and how it serves as a metaphor for data extraction and bodily discipline in the information society. Without delving further into the technical logic, her images risk falling into a “sentimental aesthetic trap,” overly dependent on emotional resonance while lacking deeper structural self-reflection.

Moreover, Jiayi places her work within an “Asian LGBTQ” context, but this positioning remains implicit, gentle, and unassertive. This is partly due to her strategic “depoliticization” of identity expression, yet it may also render her work somewhat disconnected from broader gendered cultural discourses. Faced with the international art world’s heightened sensitivity to identity politics, whether Jiayi is intentionally “avoiding labels” or attempting to forge a more poetic, non-institutional path of expression is a question worth further exploration in her future practice. It’s worth noting that rejecting labels and embracing identity ambiguity is itself a depoliticized queer image strategy.

Even so, Jiayi’s practice remains full of promise. She uses the gentlest medium to make the most insistent expression. Gentle in form, fierce in structure, she weakens the violent discourse of power through whispers. Her images are neither sharp nor noisy, yet they persistently advance a tactile imagination of the digital era—a kind of unreachable embrace, a memory of body heat behind cold glass. As the politics of sensation become a new frontier in image experimentation, Jiayi is quietly using a scanner to slowly rub away at a place we have never quite been able to touch.

In sum, Jiayi’s intervention does not directly “confront” the system but enacts a structural challenge through internal deviation, distortion, and inversion: using low-tech scanning to counter high-tech recognition; using ambiguity to counter legibility; using active impression to counter passive visibility; using blurred intimacy to counter defined identity; using tactile priority to challenge visual dominance. This is what Jiayi refers to as the intervention into digital image power systems through an “invisible bodily language.”