PALIMPSEST: WOMEN, TEXT, AND THE ACT OF SELF-INSCRIPTION
Artist & Works
Artist & Works
Jiayi Chen
Jiayi Chen is an award winning Chinese artist based in Scotland. Her interdisciplinary practice combines performance, calligraphy, storytelling, and craft, with a focus on memory, identity, and the voices of women across generations. She is internationally recognised for her creative work with Nüshu, the endangered women’s script from Hunan, China, which she reimagines through body calligraphy, dance, and participatory performance.
Her work has been presented in galleries and community contexts in the UK and China, including Edinburgh Printmakers, Fruitmarket Gallery, and Copeland Gallery in London. She also leads workshops for participants of all ages, from children as young as two to elders over eighty, creating inclusive and imaginative spaces for storytelling and cultural exchange.
website:
ins: @overelated
Gone with the wind (2025)
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seashell and woods and iron rings |
Gone With the Wind is an installation of seashells inscribed with Nüshu, the secret script once used by women in Jiangyong County, Hunan, China. Seashells were the earliest form of Chinese currency, carried across rivers and lands as objects of exchange. In this work, they are transformed into vessels of memory, becoming fragile yet enduring carriers of women’s voices.
Each shell bears a mark of Nüshu, a script created by and for women, often hidden in letters, songs, and embroidered cloth. Written on the curved surface of a shell, the script takes on a new rhythm, suggesting whispers carried by the wind and echoes from the sea. The work invites viewers to imagine what these shells might say, and to consider how language and memory travel across time, even when fragile.
The installation is both intimate and expansive. It asks us to hold close the overlooked and the delicate, and to listen to the stories that history has often silenced. By placing Nüshu on seashells, Jiayi Chen reimagines the act of exchange, offering not currency but memory, resilience, and connection. The shells speak of survival, of tides that return, and of stories that refuse to be forgotten.
Written for her on her by her (2025)
| Ink |
Nüshu is often referred to as female script, because it was created, used, and transmitted exclusively among women in this particular region, undetected and ignored by men and outsiders. Nüshu refers to those literary works created in women’s script as well as some arts and crafts decorated with those scripts and pattern.
The weight of words are still unwavering within every period of time.
As the water continues running through the stream or blood in women's veils, all culture and ecology runs continually.
Self Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2024)
Photography, fabric
I wrote this single script for women on my skin in Nushu - a language invented and used by females only on my skin. In such an era where women were deprived of education, they invented their own language to talk about their suffering and lives.
When there was no door to school which was open to them, they found their way to a voice for themselves. As for me, I used my skin as my canvas to memorialise all the missing women in my life who have been burnt away by patriarchy. My fate is intimately connected with theirs.