REIMAGINING URBAN SPACE AND EVERYDAY OBJECTS

Jundai Lin is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, textile, performance, and photography. A graduate of Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, she consistently positions her artworks at the intersection of urban space, psychology, and everyday. What sets Lin’s practice apart is her ability to activate public, disused, or transitional sites, reimagining them as thresholds between art and design. Through this approach, she creates frameworks that invite audiences to reconsider perception, attention, and the subtle dynamics of inhabiting space.

Lin’s artistic style is characterised by a distinctive preoccupation with overlooked or marginal. Rather than treating architecture or history as static references, she mobilises them as catalysts for dialogue - sites where presence, memory, and material converge. Lin's artworks reveal a quiet yet insistent intensity, dissolving the boundary between spectator and environment and compelling viewers to reconsider the fragile continuum of dwelling, construction, and erasure.

A persistent engagement unifies Lin’s artworks with space, object, and the often-overlooked traces of the urban environment. In Disorder (2023), she deconstructs fragments of furniture and repositions them within everyday contexts, reshaping how audiences imagine the codes of urban life. The A Chair in Motion series (2024) extends this inquiry by transforming the chair into a metaphorical body in transit - wandering, displaced, and re-sited within architectural ruins such as the Safehouse in London. Artworks such as Glitch (2024) and the untitled wood installations interrogate processes of material translation, exposing the invisible logic of machines and the overlooked rhythms of daily life. Her artist’s book Derive: In Motion (2025) further distils these concerns into a poetic reflection on purposeless wandering, sequencing images that capture the fleeting conjunctions of presence and movement in public space. Across these varied media, Lin consistently reimagines the thresholds between body, object, and environment, generating artworks that are at once materially grounded and conceptually resonant.

Disorder, Installation, Wood, 40x50 x60 cm, 2023

A Chair In Motion, Installation, Linen, 100 x 250 cm, 2024

Glitch, Installation, Mount Board, Etching, 50 x 50cm, 2024

Derive; In Motion, Book Art, 17 x 24cm, 2025

Lin’s cross-disciplinary outlook finds compelling expression in Apology of Aphrodite (2021–23), an experimental poetry film created in collaboration with director Yao. Structured as a multi-image narrative that weaves together video, dance, costume, and poetry, the artwork revisits the enduring conflict between desire and morality through the lens of ancient Greek mythology. The myth of Aphrodite’s affair, reimagined for contemporary audiences, becomes a framework through which universal questions are posed. Lin’s role in shaping the film’s visual and spatial language was integral - his sensitivity to the environment translated into sets that embody emotional tension while sustaining a dialogue between myth and lived human experience. The film’s critical recognition - screened at the Sunderland Shorts Film Festival and awarded at multiple international festivals - underscores how Lin’s practice not only negotiates physical sites but also adapts seamlessly to the cinematic realm, expanding her exploration of space into questions of ethics, intimacy, and collective memory.

Apology of Aphrodite, Experimental Short Film - Costume/Set Design

8mm, multi-image video installation, 2021-2023

Among Lin’s recent artworks, Untitled (2024) demonstrates her ongoing interest in material translation and urban trace. Made from mount board and developed through a sequence of deconstruction, rejoining, scanning, and machine etching, the piece embodies a chain reaction of processes - from found object to transformed image, from three-dimensional presence to two-dimensional code. What emerges is less a static object than a record of movement through the city: the residue of transport, the imprints of handling, and the hidden labour of conversion. The artwork was selected for LOVE ME IF YOU DARE (SWANFALL ART, London Design Festival 2025, Mayfair Design District), situating it into a broader dialogue of contemporary practices presented during the festival.

Untitled, Installation, Mount Board, 80 x 120 cm, 2024

Jundai Lin demonstrates a sustained curiosity in the interplay between material, space, and human perception. Her artworks navigate the subtle tension between visibility and absence, presence and movement, inviting audiences to reconsider everyday environments as sites of encounter and reflection.

Images: © Lin Jundai, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Meng Chunqing