Xinru Dai

The practice of Chinese jewellery artist Dai Xinru consistently unfolds through careful observation of social phenomena and sustained concern for the human condition. She takes jewellery as a starting point for understanding social structures and individual experience. In her work, jewellery is endowed with metaphorical and critical functions. Through a precise formal language, she compresses macro-level social issues into a wearable scale and translates them into forms that can be understood and discussed by audiences.

Dai currently serves as an associate professor in the Department of Product Design at Wuhan University of Engineering Science and Technology, with primary research interests in jewellery design, enamel, and metal craft. In addition to teaching, she is also active as a researcher, practitioner, and curator, which enables her to maintain a high level of awareness regarding the role of contemporary jewellery within social contexts.

In her practice, Dai often uses geometric forms as metaphors for different types of collective structures: rational, ordered, and clearly bounded. The movable silver pins within these structures are regarded as individuals in constant motion, shifting, approaching, and colliding within the system. These individuals both participate in the whole and hover at the boundary between autonomy and dispossession. Through this highly condensed formal language, she translates abstract social relations into visible and tangible physical states.

Her work continually focuses on the condition of individuals within collectives: a contradictory state in which the individual is simultaneously assimilated and alienated, yet attempts to break free. Proximity and distance, freedom and control, action and constraint are among the key tensions she explores. These observations are translated into structural metaphors within her jewellery works, reflecting a deep empathy for the human condition. Through jewellery as a medium, she poses a question that continues to resonate: within a collective, how does the individual perceive the self, and how can one retain it?