DaY
Photographer: Burnt Zhou
1. What significant life experiences or events have influenced and shaped your artistic vision?
Much of my practice is born from pain—fragile emotions seeking release. Creation became my vessel for grief, tenderness, and all that could not be spoken. Yet within that weight, love has always been a quiet force: my family, generous friends, and someone whose presence shifted everything. In his gaze I discovered unfamiliar parts of myself, and since meeting him my work has moved into a new dimension, expanding its language and depth. For me, love binds pain to creation, and creation is how I continue to carry love.
2. Collaboration often sparks fresh creativity. Can you share an example of a collaboration that led to an unexpected and exciting artistic outcome?
One of the most unexpected collaborations of my projects was DaY. What began as a simple portrait session with a photographer and a makeup artist friend grew into something far larger—an installation, an experimental film, and a meditation on gender beyond fixed representation. In that process, I realized how collaboration can dissolve boundaries: movement became language, gestures carried unspoken stories, and images held the fluidity of identity itself. What surprised me most was how the work no longer belonged to me alone. It became a shared space—between friends, between disciplines, between self and other— where ambiguity turned into freedom, and freedom into beauty.
3. Walk us through a specific project that challenged your creative boundaries. How did you approach it, and what did you learn from the experience?
DaY pushed me further than any project before. I often appear in my own work, but this time I stepped into the frame not as “myself,” but as a body freed from gender. It was unsettling and liberating all at once—letting gestures speak without category, allowing ambiguity to become language. What I learned is that creation can transform the self: by inhabiting that space, I didn’t just depict non-binary identity, I experienced its tension and freedom within my own skin.
4. In the ever-evolving art world, what do you believe sets your work apart and makes it unique or groundbreaking?
What I believe sets my work apart is the way it grows from making rather than only from thinking. Clarity doesn’t always arrive through definition—it emerges in the process, through attention, care, and listening. My works often resist immediate explanation; they ask to be followed, touched, and felt before they are understood.
For me, sincerity is the core: not about proving, but about staying faithful to the questions that began the work. I embrace fragile or unconventional materials, slower rhythms, and stranger forms, because they carry their own honesty. What makes my practice unique is this willingness to let the work unfold on its own terms, to trust the trace as it appears, and to invite others into that unfolding.
5. As you reflect on your journey, are there any specific goals or milestones you've set for your artistic career in the coming years?
Looking ahead, I don’t imagine a straight path but rather a series of detours—projects that surprise me as much as anyone else. In the next few years, I want to experiment with more ways of creating, so that when I look back later, I can clearly feel the growth in my own journey.
And one more specific goal: to create more unique works with the person I mentioned earlier—so that together, we can let ourselves drown gently in the tide of art, carried by its endless waves. It is not only a hope but a certainty, and I know we will.
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Expanding from DaY- a multidisciplinary project integrating installation and experimental film - this portrait series captures gender identity beyond traditional representation, focusing on movement and emotional expression. In contrast to structured narratives, these images embrace fluidity - each gesture reflecting the tension, freedom, and ambiguity of existing outside the binary.
Merging conceptual art with fashion imagery, this series challenges rigid definitions of identity, offering a visual dialogue on self-perception, recognition, and the silent language of existence.
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Creative Director/Model: Jia
Photographer/Retoucher: Burnt Zhou
Makeup Artist: Yilin Du
Assistant: Ran Dai
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Dress: I.AM.GIA
Lingerie Set: Dolls Kill
Boots: Balenciaga
Heels: Zara
Lofter: Vintage
Accessories
Jewelry: Cider, HSUX
Gloves: Dolls Kill/myself
Nipple Covers: Neva Nude
Stockings: Vintage