Jiaqian Dai is a multidisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher whose work navigates the entangled terrains of memory, writing, and monumentality across cultural and material histories. Born in Wuyishan, Fujian, China, she draws from East Asian philosophies, inscriptional traditions, and transnational aesthetics to investigate how forms of writing—carved, printed, or digital—shape public memory and cultural imagination.
She received her MFA in Graphic Design from Yale School of Art and her BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. Her thesis at Yale, Inscribing Memory: From Oracle Bone Script to Monumental Writing, examines the spatial poetics and political weight of textual monuments across time. Earlier, at CAFA, her undergraduate thesis explored the photobook as a medium where visual and verbal logics converge.
Dai’s artistic practice spans installation, typography, print, and research-based visual essays. Her projects often unfold through slow processes of translation, material inquiry, and archival intervention—probing the aesthetics of erasure, the epistemologies of monuments, and the shifting grounds of historical consciousness. Her work has been recognized with the Phelps Berdan Memorial Award (Distinction), the Andrea Frank Foundation Sanyu Scholarship, and the Alice Kimball English Travel Grant from Yale University.
Across design, writing, and curatorial work, Dai seeks to create spaces—both conceptual and tactile—where fragmented memory, displaced text, and contested histories can co-exist, collide, and be re-inscribed.
“White Papers and Flowers”
“Be Water, My Friend”
“You Steam, You Still. You Roar, You Fall”
Game Board 1 (Weiqi and Chess)
Game Board 2 (Chinese Checker)
Sundial
The Triptych
Quintuple Hanging Scroll Set (Forgetting Until Remembering Again)
Standing Screen 1 (Clouds Are Clouding)
Standing Screen 2 (Forgetting Until Remembering Again)
Commission
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