Yuxin Jiang

The Instagram Project is a constellation of works looking at the Instagram images that knowingly or not participate in the construction and consumption of the Chinese as a spectacle of ‘the other’ yet often mistaken as the societal reality.

With a satirical and analytical approach, the project takes the images (and the words accompanying them) out of Instagram, dissects, alters, and repurposes them to create new meanings and contexts. Each work within the project tackles a certain type of images with a specific method, undoing the underlying ethnocentric value judgements that fuel the popularity of them. Quirky Science Questions and Provocative Jokes Deconstructed are two works from the project.

Quirky Science Questions

A set of unexpected science questions devised based on images and video clips from Instagram. The reading of the images shifts as they are given a new function, liberating them from the narrow-minded. The questions are produced in collaboration with Theodora Ntoka, an education researcher with a quirky scientific mind.

Provocative Jokes Deconstructed

Nine of the numerous Instagram jokes made at the expense of the objectification of real people are deconstructed, each broken into three parts – people, words, captions. The flicking through jokes, es.

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readily to be laughed at, are turned into separate entities demanding viewers’ attention and thinking, making up their own minds on what is at stake with these secret pleasure.

Born in Shanghai and currently based in London, Yuxin Jiang works with photography, video, text and performance. Her work is concerned with the politics in everyday life, linguistic and visual forms of ideologies, and the role of art in society. Her current ongoing project deals with the tension between the individual and the national collective identity in a transnational context. She is the winner of Lianzhou Foto Festival 2018 Jury Prize, finalist of Jimei x Arles Discovery Award 2017 and was nominated for Magnum & Photo London’s Graduate Photographer Award 2016. She holds a MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster.