Jiarui Wang 王嘉瑞
About
Jiarui Wang (b.1998, Shanghai) is a London-based designer, artist and writer. She specialises in publication design, type design, lettering and drawing. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She hasn’t been in any exhibitions or won any awards.
Statement
I am interested in language, linguistics, literature, and history, through which my work reacts to the socio-political landscape of contemporary China. My academic work intends to diversify the Western-centric graphic design discourse.
ENT (Ear, Nose & Throat)
ENT is a publication written and designed by me. It stems from my interest in modern Chinese history and in the emotion of shame, and spontaneously developed into an internal exploration of how education, family history and various other Chinese experience shaped me through the form of writing. It is about myself, about writing, about what I was taught, about what I practice, about physical illness, about mental illness, and about all the things that never made sense until this point in my life.
Read more about this project on my website.
Sharp Speak
To illustrate words with symbolic significance for Chinese social movements, this project synthesises oracle bone scripts, wordplay, calligraphy, exercise books, dissonance, intergenerational trauma, and propaganda art. Sharp in form and obscure in meaning, Sharp Speak lives at the intersection of language, history, symbolism, and dissent.
Read more about this project on my website.
Brutalism, Maximalism and Amateurism of The New Ugly in Chinese Graphic Design
I wrote my MA dissertation on the New Ugly [新丑风], a graphic design style populated by Chinese and East Asian designers since the late 2010s, and argued for its historical and cultural significance. Many works that fall into this style challenge both Western and Chinese design principles, while criticising the rapid capitalistic development and its effect on Chinese people. I also discussed aesthetics, class consciousness, consumerism and appropriation, and I’m honoured to receive a distinction on this project.
Part of this dissertation is also adapted into A Brief History of Chinese Graphic Design (Part 1 & Part 2) on RCA Visual Communication’s content-free.net.
Digestive
Digestive, born (2022) out of love of biscuits and chatting, is a monthly reflective publication from the Visual Communication BR13 studio at the Royal College of Art. We create content based on the collective theme of the month — designed, collected, and shared on a single piece paper.
Previous issues of Digestive include Digestive, Tunnelling, Leftovers, Collective Mapping and Crusty Sunburn where we explore the gut, crumbs of conversation(s), parasites, tunnel-vision, pockets, the weather, rock pools, tubes, ideal holidays, nostalgia and revel in the sharing of nan’s recipes.
Find out more: digestive.site
2:13PM
2:13PM documents a series of “happenings,” a set of short workshops imitating the loose rules of play. They question the condition of the spaces we inhabit and whether we can utilise them for play. By moulding adult spaces into playgrounds we can enter the magic circle — to forget rules and habits, predetermined social behaviours ad conventions, to loosen up, and to break and build relationships.
Photographed by Ilka Gilvesy.