Jia Jingyao(b.2003) is a Chinese visual artist and curator working between Zhengzhou, China, and London, UK. Through a photographic practice, Jingyao explores themes of cultural representation, hyperreality, and mental health in the contemporary world. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Copeland Gallery in London.
jingyao.art@gmail.com
SIAS University, Zhengzhou
China House, London
Yaxing neighbourhood, Zhengzhou
Chessington World ofAdventures
Hai Yue Shopping Centre, Hebei
Trafford Centre, Manchester
SIAS University, Zhengzhou
Chessington World ofAdventures
China’s Occident, England’s Orient (2023-2025) explores simulated landscapes and architectural replicas in China and England, examining how cultural symbols are detached from their origins and recontextualised, and ultimately become a sign of exoticism. From Shanghai’s Thames Town to the full-scale replica of Big Ben in Zhengzhou, these environments reflect China’s fascination with Western culture. Conversely, places like Manchester’s Trafford Centre, with its exoticised Chinese-themed street, embody Western fantasies of the Orient. Through documentary photography, this project critically examines authenticity, cultural appropriation, and the power dynamics embedded in cultural representation. It invites viewers to reflect on how place, identity, and heritage are constructed within a globalised world still shadowed by its colonial past.
︎︎︎ (Research & Writting) Framing the Other: Cultural Simulation through Architectural Imitation
China's Occident,
England's Orient.
(2025)
Photographic Installation
Variable Dimensions
Digital C-type prints on Transparent paper, LED panels, looping video on monitor, chairs, wooden desk, photo books.
Part of the group exhibition Moments Towards the Self, Moments Towards the History at London College of Communication, May 2025.
By transforming these architectures into illuminated, almost commercial display cases like an estate agent, the glowing façades highlight the buildings’ status as visual signs, stripped of depth and sold as dreams. The lightboxes make the buildings literal beacons of simulation — attractive and consumable. In both China and the UK, these spaces stage mirrored fantasies shaped by colonial legacies, global capitalism, and the power of images. When a space’s meaning is reduced to its visual consumption, what happens to authentic cultural identity?
Photobook
China's Occident,
England's Orient.
Hardcover Photobook
China's Occident,
England's Orient.
Hardcover Photobook
Dos-A-Dos binding
148mm x 197mm
Designed and bound by artist
Printed at London College of
Communication, May 2025
Photobook Flip Through Video (Duration: 11min 10secs) (Double-click for fullscreen, right arrow key to fast-forward.)
Tai'andao,Tianjin
SIAS University, Zhengzhou
Academy of Fine Arts, Hebei
Thames Town, Shanghai
Chessington World ofAdventures
Chinese Garage, Beckenham
Trafford Centre, Manchester
Wing Yip Superstore, Birmingham
Thames Town, Shanghai
Thames Town, Shanghai
World Park, Beijing
SIAS University, Zhengzhou
Battersea Park, London
Wing Yip Superstore,Birmingham
Victoria Park,London
Chinese pagoda, Birmingham
Replica of Tower Bridge, World Park, Beijing
Cultural Cut: East/ West Collage invites viewers to physically recompose fragments of architectural photographs, reflecting the layered visual logic behind culturally hybrid buildings. Each page is sliced horizontally into three sections, allowing new combinations of façades, roofs, and ornamental details to emerge. The result is a dynamic reassembly of structures drawn from both Western replicas in China and Oriental-style buildings in the UK. By fragmenting these forms, the book gestures towards the patchwork logic of real-world architectural appropriation—where, for example, a Japanese pagoda might crown a Chinese structure.
Developed from China’s Occident, England’s Orient, this book does not aim to mock, but to materialise the structural logic of aesthetic borrowing and cultural hybridisation. It acknowledges how architecture often functions as a symbolic collage—intended less to represent heritage, and more to signal identity, aspiration, or global belonging.
photobook
Cultural Cut: East/ West Collage
ssteel wire, riso print photographs
148mm x 197mm 22 pages
Cultural Cut: East/ West Collage
ssteel wire, riso print photographs
148mm x 197mm 22 pages
This book explores exoticised and transcultural architectures in China and England through a concept of 'architectural collage.'
To illustrate this hybridisation, I blend my photographs of Western architectural replicas in China with Chinese pagodas in England.
Flipping through the photobooks
(Video Duration: 3mins 14 secs)
Photographs & Locations
China House, Criclewood, London
Wing Yip Croydon, London
Victoria Park, London
Wing Yip Croydon,London
the Chinese Garage,London
Taian British Cultural Landscape Block, Tianjin
World Park, Beijing, China
SIAS University, Zhengzhou
Jinma TriumphalSquare, Zhengzhou
Hebei Academy of Fine Arts, , Shijiazhuang
Chinese pagoda, Birmingham
The Orient, Trafford Centre, Manchester
Wing Yip Oriental Supermarket, Manchester
Chessington World of Adventures, Chessington
Shaolin Temple UK, Islington
Pegasus Water City,Jiangyin
Hebei Academy of Fine Arts, Shijiazhuang
SIAS University, Zhengzhou
Great Wall Film Studio, Shijiazhuang
SIAS University, Zhengzhou
Curated by Jingyao Jia, Jiayi Wang and Jingchen Han
Technician: Zichen Wang
Photography and Text by Jingyao Jia
Within & Beyond (2025) brings together London-based artists of Asian heritage, whose practices critically engage with themes of migration, memory, and cultural hybridity. Working across diverse media, they examine how identity is continuously shifted amid experiences of displacement and intercultural encounter.
The exhibition draws on cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space,’ conceived as a site of hybridity in which meanings are contested and novel cultural expressions emerge. Within this framework, identity is never fixed but remains in a state of formation, continuously shaped by displacement, language, and the interpretive gaze of others.
Expanding on Bhabha’s framework, the exhibition transforms the gallery itself into a third space — a site where personal memory and grand narratives meet, clash, and renegotiate, allowing hybrid identities to emerge. From intimate paintings inspired by childhood memory, the reimagined English Willow plates, to AI-mediated images, Within & Beyond resists reducing difference to mere labels. Instead, it preserves hybridity and dislocation as processes in motion, inviting both artists and audiences to participate in the ongoing formation of identities within the globalised present.
Exhibition view from Maybe Someday, One Day (2024)
Group Exhibition at the Copeland Gallery, London
Willow Ben Plate
Designed by artist
10-inch Ceramic plate, 2024
Designed by artist
10-inch Ceramic plate, 2024
Blue Willow Salad Plate by Churchill
Purchased online by artist
20cm Ceramic plate, 2024
Purchased online by artist
20cm Ceramic plate, 2024
Installation in the Photo: Willow Ben (2024) by Jingyao Jia
Curated by Jingyao Jia, Jay Lim, Kim Lee and Dan Higginson
publication
perfect bound
Moments Towards the Self, Moments Towards the History
perfect bound
Designed by Jingyao Jia and Luke Needman, supervised by Lalu Delbracio.
Undergraduate Exhibition Catalogue of BA Photojournalism and BA Photography, London College of Communication, 2025.
magzine
perfect bound
Designed by Jingyao Jia, lilah culliford and