Jiqiang (Johnny) Wen

Jiqiang (Johnny) Wen is a creative practitioner based in Shanghai and London. Working as a creative and an art director across print, digital, social and film with almost a decade’s experience.

Johnny returned to academia to refine his design methodology and independent practice. His work is driven by trying to balance visual languages of commercial design and fine art approaches.

He is engaged with a critique of today’s society, where designers are facing competition from technology such as the evolution of AI, to provoke the public to think about how humans will construct and build new futures, beyond binaries and stereotypes.

My personal practice interests mainly focus on society culture, autoethnography, related to gender and binary theory, through observing and interviews, collecting data from social media, analysing and reflecting on my own experience and background. I take design as a means to express emotions, developing abstract visual languages, blending this with humour and sarcastic language to reveal the problems in society that exist below our eyeline. With a focus on narrative to create experimental films, combining sound, environment and interaction with audiences, my work tries to explore the boundaries of visual communication.

Warning: This section contains mature or explicit content.

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Adonis’ Wonderland is a short film of self-identity exploration, it is named after the Greek god Adonis, whose body represented an exquisite standard of masculinity.

This film explores male body image problems and personal gender identity through imagining the writer himself as Adonis and telling a story that takes place in a fantasy wonderland. This is a way to critique my obsession with masculinity in public perception, such as strong body types; to show how contemporary Chinese gay culture fetishises masculinity above all else, and how this influences gay men like me, who do not conform to this stereotype.