Wenqiang Jia

Shows the author's collection of 100 different people writing hello in ink on a mobile phone keyboard via brushes.

Wenqiang Jia (b. 1998), better known as Javen, is a multidisciplinary artist, experience designer, and poet based in London and Beijing.

With a background in product design and speculative design, Javen explores the connections and developments between technology and culture, society and the humanities, creating poetic interactive experiences that explore the intersections of existentialism, post-modernism, fundamentalism, and the ethics of technology, creating new ways of interacting with experience through the use of mixed media and new technologies that question deeply held social mappings.

Education

2022-2023 MA Information Experience Design, Royal College of Art (UK)
2017-2021 BA Product Design, Central Academy of Fine Arts (CN)

When I was a five-year-old, the world I understood and faced consisted of a series of perceptible continuities. I can still recall the smoke of cooking in the evening on the outskirts of the city and the time stretched out by boredom.

In the subsequent 20 years of China's rapid development, I was exposed to one development policy and emerging technology after another. Smoke no longer rose from the outskirts of the city because of the ban on fireworks. Time became faster and faster as it was stuffed with efficiency. As a native of technology, it filled my growing curiosity, but there was always a calm and ambiguous distance between me and it.

The technological deluge has led to the disappearance of more and more spiritual and cultural wilderness. The standardization of things, in its quest for increased productivity, has gradually led to the erasure of traces of human existence to the point of invisibility. When the standardized production buildings cover the cultural wilderness, what I see is the infinite compression of human existence. What I want to do at this stage is to be able to tell "stories" through art, to create a counter-efficient way of lengthening the moment to combat the disappearance of the wilderness.

Now that I am 25 years old, I still think of the smoke of the wilderness I saw when I was five years old, in the face of the fast-moving city.

Letters Alive - WIP Show, Garden House (UK)

Letters Alive

“Letters Alive" aims to discuss the absence of the communicator in the transmission of information today when keyboard and font input methods are gradually replacing pen and paper and calligraphy. The emotions, states, and habits of the letter writer in the act of writing create richness in calligraphy, reflecting the specific oneness of the person behind the letter.

As a Chinese idiom, it often appears at the beginning of a letter, meaning “Seeing the handwriting is like seeing in person”

The impact of today's communication technology on traditional calligraphy has led to communication relying more on the screen than paper. The presence of the communicator cannot be perceived across a screen with a standardized script. By capturing the trajectory of the experiencer's fingers as they type, this project builds new forms of calligraphy within the logic of the keyboard through the technology of AI generation. It discusses how to maintain a human presence in the midst of the technological deluge.

Letters Alive - The Fading Spaciousness, Bargehouse OXO Tower (UK)

In Collaboration with:

Xuyao Liang

Medium:

Screens, Printers, Paper, Phones, Mini-hosts

Size:

50 x 50 x 200cm

Keyboard Calligraphy Al-generated mapping, 2023

Keyboard Calligraphy AI Data, 2023

Trajectory overlay for on-screen calligraphy

Medium:

Rice paper, Ink, Acrylic and Nails

Size:

170 x 170 x 20cm

calligraphy identity keyboard visual-art writing

The Cold Food Observance is a letter written by Su Dongpo, a literary scholar of the Chinese Song Dynasty, to his younger brother. The textual changes in this letter contain a very rich variation of Su Dongpo's emotions. Using the logic of 'keyboard calligraphy', I reproduced 'The Cold Food Observance' by placing the rice paper on the screen of my mobile phone, simulating Su Dongpo's emotions and showing the details that were hidden during the typing process.

When we read a letter, what we see are the ink marks left behind by the writer. Yet to truly understand this object, this artifact that has shared space with the letter writer's aura of life, we must rely on our senses. A letter is not merely a vehicle for information; the information within a letter becomes obsolete once it's read, but the cherished sentiments of the sender, embodied in the letter, are preserved in its physical form.

Medium:

Rice paper, Ink, Phone, Moving image

Size:

Size variable

artwork calligraphy performance performative transformation visual-art

Wenqiang Jia

Letters Alive

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About

Royal College of Art