AUTHORISED ABSENCE

Identity, Symbol, and Institutional Power

Social Context: Visibility, Labour, and Cultural Disappearance

Born on China’s northeastern border and raised during the brief prosperity of the coal boom before its collapse, artist Ji Chai grew up amid the structural volatility that continues to shape contemporary labour and class formation. She belonged to a generation of migrant workers who navigated anonymity through online platforms, self-styling, and improvised forms of visibility. Yet her work does not adopt autobiography as its primary mode. Personal history functions instead as an entry point into a broader analysis of how power regulates memory, legitimacy, and cultural value.

Chai’s artistic practice examines how identity is constructed, authorised, and ultimately erased within systems of power. Working across installation, sculpture, text, and institutional display, she has developed a method that treats disappearance not as a failure of history but as one of its most revealing mechanisms. Her work asks a difficult question: not how marginal cultures might be represented, but why certain forms of life are never granted the conditions to endure.

This inquiry is grounded in lived experience but articulated through critical distance.

Her recent body of work, most fully articulated in the long-term project Royal Screw addresses the youth subculture Shamate (杀马特[1]), once highly visible before being rapidly ridiculed into disappearance. Rather than recovering it as folklore or framing it as resistance, Chai examines the structural conditions that made its erasure appear natural. Museums are often understood as spaces of preservation, yet they are equally mechanisms of exclusion. Their authority lies not only in what they display but also in what they render invisible.

Phone Grave, 2025, Mobile Phone, Cement-Based Encasement, Digital Animation

15.4 x 10 x 2.5cm

Symbols, Language, and Material Translation

Across her practice, Chai repeatedly returns to objects that exist at the threshold between use and discard: identification cards, currency, keyboards, cigarettes, ornaments, and religious symbols. These objects are not selected for aesthetic novelty but for their function within everyday systems of classification. By isolating and transforming them, Chai reveals the quiet violence embedded in bureaucratic order - how naming, numbering, and categorising determine whose presence is recorded and whose disappearance goes unmarked.

Material translation plays a central role in this inquiry. Chai frequently employs jade, bone, and stone -materials historically associated with ritual permanence and elite value - to recreate objects that were originally cheap, digital, or transient. In works such as the Jade ID series, online usernames, ranks, and mottos are carved into jade plaques traditionally associated with authority and legitimacy. The gesture exposes a structural contradiction: identifiers that once held meaning within digital communities are rendered permanent in a material language historically reserved for social recognition, yet institutional legitimacy remains absent.

Language itself becomes another site of disappearance. In works referencing Martian script - an obsolete online writing system and early form of digital slang - Chai highlights forms of expression that vanish without leaving archival traces. The comparison to ancient scripts is deliberate: some languages are preserved as civilisation, while others are dismissed as noise. What disappears is not merely a mode of speech but the social world that sustained it.

?, 2025, Carved Jade with Negative-Space Incision, 20 x 14.2cm

Jade ID series, 2025, Carved Jade

 Jade ID series, 2025, Carved Jade, 8 x 13.8cm

Boken Jade ID, 2025, Carved Jade

Multi-Media Systems and the Pseudo-Museum

Chai’s work does not operate through individual objects alone but through systems of display. Sculpture, installation, text, and exhibition design function together to produce meaning through accumulation. In the project Royal Screw, vitrines, labels, light boxes, and archaeological captions construct what can be understood as a pseudo-museum - an environment that mimics the language of institutional authority while simultaneously placing it under scrutiny.

Within this framework, symbols become dislocated from their original contexts. Crosses, coins, door gods, and other culturally charged forms appear stripped of belief and function, revealing how visual authority circulates independently of conviction. Sacred imagery becomes ornamental; religious figures are recoded as instruments of labour or control. Rather than staging spectacle, Chai constructs systems that require the viewer to navigate fragments, evidence, and classification.

Keyboard, 2025, Animal Bone

By positioning the viewer as a reader of institutional structures rather than a passive spectator, Chai exposes how memory is organised and legitimised. Her work ultimately proposes that disappearance is not the absence of meaning but one of its most revealing expressions. Through a precise interplay of social context, symbolic translation, and multi-media display, she reveals the mechanisms through which cultures, languages, and lives are rendered visible - or quietly erased - within contemporary society.

Note 1: Shamate (杀马特, Shāmǎtè) refers to a youth subculture that emerged in China in the early 2000s among migrant factory workers, particularly in the manufacturing regions of southern China. Influenced by Japanese visual kei and early internet aesthetics, Shamate participants developed highly stylised appearances - brightly dyed and sculpted hair, dramatic makeup, and DIY fashion - as forms of self-expression and visibility within conditions of industrial labour and social marginalisation. The term itself is a phonetic rendering of the English word “smart.” Widely circulated through early online forums and social media, the subculture was later subject to intense public ridicule and media stigmatisation, contributing to its rapid disappearance from mainstream visibility.

Images: ©Ji Chai, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Lavinia Jin