About Jiayi Chen
Jiayi Chen is a performance and visual artist based between Edinburgh and London. Her work is rooted in Nüshu, a women’s script from southern China, and unfolds through writing on the body, movement, voice, and live performance.
Jiayi works across performance, body calligraphy, photography, and participatory workshops. She invites others to join in the act of writing, moving, and remembering together. Her practice focuses on themes of memory, migration, and how women’s stories are passed down, lost, and rewritten across generations. For Jiayi, Nüshu is more than a historical language. It is a way of listening, a way of holding grief, and a way of staying connected to the women who came before her.
Her performances have been presented internationally, including at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where she has received multiple awards and recognition for feminist storytelling and accessibility. She is the first Chinese woman to win the Creative Edinburgh Award in 2024 and has been nominated for the UN Women UK Award in 2025.
In addition to her performances, Jiayi leads workshops in galleries, universities, and community spaces, as well as in elder-care centres in China. These sessions focus on shared writing, embodied language, and creating space for women to tell their own stories, often for the first time.
Her practice continues to evolve as a living archive, where writing, movement, and collective presence become tools for remembering, resisting erasure, and imagining new forms of solidarity.