Jiayi Gu, currently lives and works in London. Her practice revolves around image-making, extending across photography, installation, and the book form. Through these media, she explores the subtle dialogue between nature, humanity, and temporality.
2025
2025
2025
2024
Ceci n’est pas Hackney, Youth Mobile Photography Exhibition, Filet, London (UK)
Design 360 Festival, Hangzhou (CN)
A World Observed, LCC Earth Week Exhibition, London (UK)
LCC Post-Graduation Shows, London (UK)
Graphic Design
Printing
Installation / Spatial Design
Photography
Rethinking Borders in the Shadow of Himalaya
London, UK
2024-2025
Focusing on the conflict between national boundaries and fluid natural boundaries around the Himalayan mountain, this project explores the existence of ambivalent boundaries between China and India under climate changes. In cartography, natural features like rivers or mountains are often defined as borders, appearing logical. However, nature's complexity can lead to conflicts. It seems to have been overlooked that this land is supposed to be a region and not a real border.
This project aims to challenge the binary thinking imposed by political structures. It tries to illustrate an immersive visual narrative between politics and nature under Himalaya’s silent view.
When lines of longitude and latitude form a cage, blockades of all kinds are everywhere, and territorial conflicts are aggravated by the demarcation of precise borders. Meanwhile, the lines that define territories on maps have been silently shifted by climate change. When faced with the existence of an ambivalent border, the binary thinking under oppressive political structures has made the cage of the meridian even more solid, while nature is trying to break out of the cage.
London, UK
2023
Stone as a tough and long lived material, is usually been carved and used as a significant for permanent and stability, like the phrase “written in stone”. However, as Karl Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air”. Over the years, nature is so powerful that the words in stone will be teared and faded away eventually. At this point, the definitions and symbols that people give to the stone are no longer important.
This project explores the tension between the perceived permanence of stone and its inevitable erosion. Gravestones offer a site where human intentions—memory, legacy, permanence—encounter the quiet persistence of natural forces. Once carved, they become vessels of meaning, yet their surfaces inevitably fade.
London, UK
2023
Situated between fragility and resilience, this installation reflects on how natural environments shift under the pressure of the climate crisis. Broken leaves and skeletal forms suggest a forest that has been affected, yet still holds signs of life. The book acts as a small piece of terrain, unfolding slowly and revealing traces of what once existed.
Positioned between what is fading and what is still present, the installation reflects on how natural environments respond to pressure and disturbance. It offers a simple, open moment to think about how landscapes change, and how those changes remain with us.
Hangzhou, CN
2022
Positioned between silence and censorship, private voices and official narratives, this project examines the soundscape of Shanghai during the pandemic. Using John Cage’s 4′33″ as a metaphor, the work reflects on the gap between what was amplified and what was erased. As official messaging dominated the public sphere, the more fragile, everyday signals shared by residents were steadily pushed out of sight, creating a manufactured stillness. By gathering these suppressed fragments, the installation points to a silence shaped by control, where what is hidden continues to surface in subtle, persistent ways.
Hangzhou, CN
2022
Between the everyday and the uncanny, stillness and movement, this project observes the presence of unattended chairs scattered across the neighbourhood. Weathered yet persistent, they stand as quiet markers of human rhythms, holding space where footsteps pass and pauses rarely settle.
Within this broader landscape, one chair was selected and subtly transformed with a new layer of fabric and paper. This modest intervention shifts the chair from a discarded street object to a point of reflection, echoing traces of past use while inviting a reconsideration of care, time and urban drift. By positioning the chair as an active presence rather than a passive remnant, the work reflects on how ordinary objects absorb human gestures and quietly shape the atmospheres of the places they inhabit.
Hangzhou, CN
2022
Inspired by Emanuele Coccia’s statement that “there is nothing purely human, the vegetal exists in all that is human.” This project challenges anthropocentrism by presenting trees as equals to humans, exploring their emotional connections, coexistence in public spaces, and anthropomorphic interpretations to deepen the human-tree relationship. Through this lens, the project reflects on how the human–tree relationship becomes a site where coexistence, interpretation and mutual influence quietly unfold.