Huang Jianming

Short Bio / Artistic Career
Huang Jianming is a Chinese artist-researcher living and working in Italy. His practice investigates how technology, geopolitical structures, and systems of power shape identity and individual experience in the digital age. Working with technological images, personal archives, urban spaces, and participatory processes, he creates video works, interactive installations, and artistic interventions. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Bologna. His work has been presented in London, Beijing, Milan, and Changsha.

Artistic Statement
My artistic practice examines how individuals are represented, classified, and transformed by technological and political systems. I am particularly interested in the moment of transition when personal experience is translated into an image, a document, a data point, or an administrative category.
My work involves video, technological images, personal archives, urban spaces, and participatory methods. Rather than treating technology as a neutral tool, I understand it as an infrastructure that produces particular ways of seeing. Cameras, scanners, interfaces, databases, and algorithms do not simply record reality; they also determine what can be made visible, how it can be interpreted, and who has the authority to interpret it.
My experience of living between China and Europe has made migration, identity, borders, and cultural translation central to my practice. I often place personal narratives and intimate objects within impersonal technological systems. Through the tension between them, I explore what continues to resist classification: memory, emotional attachment, ambiguity, vulnerability, and the contradictions of lived experience.

1. How does your academic research on systems of power and digital identity enrich your practical approach to technological images?
My academic research helps me understand technological images not simply as representations, but as instruments that participate in the organisation of social reality. A technological image is never entirely neutral. It is produced by a specific apparatus, designed for a particular purpose, and embedded within institutional structures.
My background in animation initially taught me how images can be constructed and manipulated. During my studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, I began to examine the political and social conditions behind image production. My current doctoral research allows me to situate these questions within broader discussions of surveillance, digital identity, geopolitical power, and algorithmic governance.
This research directly informs my artistic method. When I use an X-ray scanner, a camera, or another technological apparatus, I am interested not only in the resulting image but also in the system of vision that produces it. I ask who created this system, what it is designed to identify, and what kinds of knowledge or power it generates.
Artistic practice allows me to test these theoretical questions materially and emotionally by bringing abstract systems of control into contact with personal voices, memories, bodies, and objects.

2. How does your personal journey as a Chinese artist living and studying in Europe shape your critical perspective on contemporary surveillance infrastructures?
Living between China and Europe has made me highly conscious that identity is never read in a completely neutral way. It is interpreted through passports, visas, borders, institutional documents, cultural expectations, and technological systems.
For someone living abroad, everyday life is frequently mediated by administrative procedures. The individual must continuously translate themselves into categories that institutions can understand: nationality, residency status, educational background, biometric data, and professional identity. This experience has made me attentive to the gap between a person’s lived identity and the simplified version of that identity produced by an institution.
My position as a Chinese artist in Europe also prevents me from understanding surveillance as belonging to only one political or geographical system. Its forms may differ, but the desire to record, classify, predict, and manage individuals exists across contemporary societies.
I therefore approach surveillance not only as a visible security mechanism, but also as a structure embedded in education, migration, labour, digital platforms, and daily communication.

1. What inspired you to transform the X-ray scanner from an administrative security technology into a medium for poetic exploration?
I was drawn to the X-ray scanner because it produces a strangely intimate image through an extremely impersonal process. In daily life, X-ray technology is associated with hospitals, airports, border control, and security inspections. It is designed to identify risks and reveal what cannot be seen from the outside.
However, the X-ray image is also visually ambiguous. It removes colour and surface, transforming familiar objects into transparent structures, shadows, densities, and outlines. An object carrying a deeply personal history can become almost unrecognisable.
This contradiction became the starting point of ASSEMBLY LINE. I wanted to take a technology normally used to detect danger and ask it to look at emotional attachment instead. Rather than scanning prohibited objects, the work scans objects chosen by the participants because of their personal significance.
The scanner still exposes and classifies, but it is confronted with memories, desires, attachments, and experiences that it cannot fully interpret. It can reveal the internal structure of an object while remaining incapable of understanding why that object matters.

2. How does the material flattening produced by the X-ray reveal the emotional weight of the participants and their objects?
I invited twenty-five Chinese students living abroad to select objects that carried personal meaning. These included amulets, rings, sex toys, pet keepsakes, cameras, and wenwan objects. The objects represent different relationships to memory, sexuality, family, protection, desire, and cultural identity.
The X-ray removes the ordinary visual identities of these objects. Their colours, surfaces, material familiarity, and social value disappear. They are reduced to structure and density. Within this flattened visual field, objects with very different meanings begin to resemble one another.
Paradoxically, this loss of visible information draws attention to what the image cannot communicate. The scanner can show the internal construction of an object, but it cannot show its emotional history. This absence creates a space for the participants’ voices.
Their testimonies return meaning to the objects, but they do not restore a single, stable interpretation. A tension develops between the machine’s image and the individual’s memory. The X-ray exposes the object materially, while the voice reveals that material exposure is not the same as emotional understanding.

3. Does the visual levelling of bodies and commodities suggest that contemporary systems treat them with the same transactional indifference?
The X-ray’s visual language reflects my concern that contemporary systems increasingly process bodies and objects through similar operational categories.
The same imaging system can translate biological bodies and manufactured objects into variations of density, structure, and potential risk. It does not recognise emotional value, biography, or social experience. It processes whatever enters its field according to the same technical logic.
This resembles how people are frequently treated within contemporary economic and administrative systems. Bodies become biometric information, users become behavioural data, students become institutional records, migrants become case numbers, and personal relationships become monetisable patterns of interaction.
However, I do not want to suggest that bodies and commodities are actually equivalent. This equivalence belongs to the system’s way of seeing. By making that logic visible, the work asks viewers to recognise the violence contained within this apparent neutrality.

4. How can emotional attachment become a form of resistance against total systemic surveillance?
Surveillance systems depend on reducing complexity. To classify something, the system must separate relevant information from irrelevant information. Ambiguity, contradiction, and emotional complexity therefore become obstacles to efficient processing.
Emotional attachment resists this logic because its meaning cannot be derived from the material object alone. A small, ordinary item may hold a history that is invisible to an external observer. Even if the object is scanned and recorded, its intimate significance remains partially inaccessible.
In ASSEMBLY LINE, resistance does not necessarily take the form of direct refusal. The participants willingly place their objects under the scanner, but the resulting images fail to contain the full meaning of what has been scanned. Intimacy survives in the distance between what the machine reveals and what the individual remembers.
For me, vulnerability and ambiguity can become quiet forms of resistance. They remind us that being visible is not the same as being understood, and that total access to information does not produce total knowledge of a person.

5. How does the friction between mechanical sounds and emotional testimonies increase the narrative tension of the work?
The soundscape creates two different temporal and emotional systems.
The electronic hum, mechanical movement, and repetitive action of the lucky cat establish an impersonal rhythm. These sounds suggest machinery, productivity, circulation, and repetition. They evoke an assembly line in which each body or object passes through the same process.
The participants’ voices interrupt this rhythm. They speak about homesickness, family pressure, childhood expectations, survival, and the struggle to make independent choices. Their voices are hesitant, fragmented, and emotionally specific. Unlike the machine, they do not follow a predictable pattern.
The viewer is therefore placed between the repetitive logic of the apparatus and the unstable emotional reality of the participants. The mechanical sound attempts to organise the experience, while the testimonies continually exceed that organisation. This friction makes the conflict between systemic repetition and individual difference physically perceptible.

6. What does the contemporary “assembly line” represent in the work?
For me, the contemporary assembly line is not limited to the factory. It describes a broader social condition in which individuals are repeatedly processed, evaluated, and prepared to fit existing systems.
For international students, this assembly line can be found in education, migration, employment, and family expectations. One moves through degrees, visas, applications, evaluations, and professional requirements. Success is often presented as a standard sequence: graduate, find work, achieve stability, and fulfil the expectations of one’s family.
At the same time, digital platforms create another assembly line. Our gestures, images, conversations, movements, and preferences are continuously recorded and converted into data. Even personal expression can become part of an economic system of measurement and monetisation.
The factory floor, the academic system, international migration, and algorithmic recording are therefore interconnected metaphors. Each requires the individual to become legible and productive within a predetermined structure.
The participant’s statement—“survival comes first… I’m trying, in my own way, to resist a little”—expresses the contradiction at the centre of the work. Resistance may be necessary, but it occurs within systems that individuals cannot simply leave.