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Time flies so fast, and it comes to the last week in a blink of an eye. I still remember the frustration of me two months ago when I got a PTE score which was one point less than the admission requirement. I had worked hard for more than one year for my graduation work, portfolio, and English. I was eager for a vacation and eager to read, to do more sports, the eight-week language class seemed so long at the time, but now it seems so short.

I like the reading materials provided by EAP every week. They have a certain degree of difficulty but always can be overcome. I like webinars, even though it is often necessary to understand what the speakers of different professional backgrounds and accents say through meeting minutes. I also like my classmates in our class. Weining is like the monitor, she forwards the assignments on the padlet every day. And Wanlin, who always posts links and files before the class. Everyone is friendly and helpful. Of course, I also like our teacher, you, Claire, always encourage us. Before that, I had studied English for many years. Although I was not very serious most of the time, I also spent a lot of energy. The slow progress made me doubt my language talent. However, from then on I will no longer be afraid of speaking English and have the confidence to learn a new language.

What's more, besides my parents, you are the third person who isn't my peer knowing that I am a lesbian. Although I think coming out is not a difficult task for me, I still avoid talking about it in my daily life. Last Saturday, when I was asked why I don’t have a boyfriend for the nth time in the barbershop, I directly said that I like girls and discussed with the apprentice about sexual minorities and diverse aesthetic issues. This may not be directly related to the EAP, but I think changes happened quietly in the past eight weeks.

I hope I can continue to update this blog after finishing the course. Padlet is suitable for recording life and reading notes. Welcome to come in and have a look at any time! I hope we can meet in London soon.

Thanks again, Claire.

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An illustration for a suspense story↑, painted by my dog.

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We spend 5 years together since when I was half past 2.

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I've seen a lot of old movies, and it helps me a lot in finding materials for the video montage. Both of these films are excellent, especially the first one, Almost a Love Story, it's one of my favourite movies. Maggie Cheung is my goddess!

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While we were watching Crenshaw's speech in class, my eyes were teary. Abby Dobson’s voice was so touching, I've never felt so sad at the beginning of a song.

I am a female, lesbian, Chinese……each identity can be discriminated against by some people. However, I am so fortunate for that I have not been affected by discrimination in my growing experience. But I know that if we ignore people who are suffering, discrimination is a time bomb for those of us who are temporarily safe. The most impressive scene in the soul of a movement for me was Silent = Death. This is also a crisis for minority groups in China.

For English learning, I think the biggest difficulty now is the reaction capacity. I still need to translate lots of words into Chinese first in my mind for understanding even if I know the words. Because of the unfamiliar western means of expression, sometimes the result of translation is confusing for me too.

In addition, the network problems really waste a lot of time, I don't know whether it's the mistake of my VPN or the school website. I had never wanted to go back to school so badly!

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Today we had our first webinar with PhD students in RCA, and they were working on topics that were very new to me. Even though I tried to listen as careful as I can, the speeches were still too complex to understand for me. I recorded everything they said and hope to review and understand the content of every webinar by the end of the 8-week course.

In the evening, while watching the introductions of this year's graduation works, I discussed a lot with my future classmates. Although I have always been interested in art since I was little and have done some interesting things, I still feel that I don't know much about contemporary art yet as a student who changed a major. During the conversation, I found that I am not the only one who has these doubts. We had too much restrictions in our schools and instructed to make “correct answers”. Whether the girl who studied printmaking in an art academy, wants to be a social activist, or me, studied interior design in architecture school, wants to make artistic expression with space. The future study is both a challenge and opportunity for us, not only to create new works, but also to find who we are.

Thanks to the language course, I have started this journey.

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My dog sleeps on my slippers every day until my parents come home from work.

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I made a joke during the class today.

At noon, I went home without locking the door. Around five o 'clock, the door of my home was opened. My dog barked and rushed out. It must be my mom, I thought and quickly closed the door of my room, went back to the laptop for class.

Usually, my mother would greet the dog for a few words when she comes back, and then start to cook the dinner. Today, there was no sound......

I began to feel uneasy.

During the group discussion, I thought that I have to go out and see what is going on outside.
Unexpectedly, on the shoe cabinet, I saw a strange bag containing wallet, keys and certificates I had never seen before. And my dog disappeared too.

My heart started racing, I opened the door and called my dog's name, there was no respond! I called my mom's phone, then called my dad.

My mother scolded me: "Why didn't you lock the door? "

And My father said: "It is my colleague's bag, he came back in my car today. I am taking the dog for a walk before it rains."

......

I returned to the laptop, after my partner said my dog was theft. In front of everyone's concerned eyes, I do not know how to tell this story......

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Pearl/Bubble milk tea is called Zhen zhu nai cha in Chinese. The pronounciation of "pearl"(Zhen zhu) is same as "real pig" in Chinese.

I have inspired by my dog a lot, and opened an account named PupPeeGallery for collecting art works created and related to dogs.

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My kindergarten teacher, who loved me dearly when I was a child, moved back to our community and met my father in the vegetable shop last Saturday. She said that she missed me so much and would like to meet me someday. When I think about going out and meeting somebody who was very close to me and I haven't seen for about twenty years, tears always come.

I was unable to fall asleep last night and started to search for the pictures and videos of my kindergarten on internet. I only found a few videos from 2008 to 2010, when many of my teachers had retired. The next day I quickly took out the album to see the photo of my teacher and me. The memories were so sweet.

One of the motivations for looking through videos and photos was to recognize my teacher once we meet. Because I don't think she/they will recognize me. (But the teacher recognized my father at the first sight.) However, looked at the photos, I found that the teacher in my memory is no longer the true image of her in those days, let alone 17 years passed. The good news is that we know each other's addresses, and when I get over these days of tearing at the thought of the meeting, maybe I'll be able to visit her.

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Social media has made possible networked uprisings and drawn together disparate struggles toward horizons of reform, revolution, identity, or survival. At the same time, the accumulation of social data in the form of online messages and pronouncements has provided a new vector for acts of violence as old as the state: surveillance, criminalization, incarceration, etc. These platforms are of course also value-producing and attempt the direct conversion of sociality into proﬁt. Like the capitalist dream of robot workers, the direct conversion of life into value is a fantasy about the full negation of labor.

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Many still persist in valorizing anonymity and privacy online, as if, with these conditions intact, the Internet will remain or become a safe space for acts of politics or survival. This idea relies on an under-interrogated conception of the political as arising from autonomy and agency. Perhaps consideration of the histories of anti-colonial struggle and slave uprisings, to give two cases where acts of transformative resistance happened without any meaningful top-down recognition of autonomy, privacy, or even personhood, might complicate this understanding of enclosure.

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With and against innovation, we develop new forms of proximity to make up for those we have lost or to sustain those that are constantly under threat. Intimacy remains necessary and hard to mechanize. That is either because it is irreducibly human or because the work of women or people who are like women is cheap or free at the point of service. Although each new platform is a new terrain, there is as yet no machine that can accurately synthesize whatever it is that animates the social. That remains the job of women, or of people who are like women.

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People’s willingness to share intimate details of their lives in collective online spaces means that the dominant critiques of social media, often centered around issues of privacy, simply end up scolding the messy, over-disclosing users for being bad political subjects. Instead it might be more interesting to register the ways in which the existing politics expressed on these platforms already go beyond and complicate ideas about privacy, the commons, and so on.

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In a video I made recently,
I explicitly asked viewers to understand the work as a technology of love. I know that art can also be a technology of hate, or indifference, or whatever. In any case, love is a word I use to describe the more ﬁssured and painful experiences of my life, as well as the best, or what I’m saying is that I use love to describe experiences that were a lot of things at the same time. The video’s claim was more that art might be understood as a technology of relationship. Don’t look at me, look at my work! And yet as much as my work expresses various kinds of longing that I have, various registers of longing, I remain naively amazed that it has never really helped me meet them. I cannot live as my work, even though my work also lives as me among others.

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When you aggregate the social for example on an app you also aggregate violence. Violence is not hard to mechanize. We already have robots who can do that. Violence is not outside the social. For now, violence is threaded all through. The police are a technology for the generalization of violence. So is the legal system. So are men. Everything is a technology for something. The robot is disappointing. It does not know how to behave. The artist does not know how to behave either, and she is not entirely sure what she is a technology for. Paciﬁcation? Critique? Love, like in her video?

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Being read or misread is not the central problem. Reading and misreading, in an expanded sense, are among the ﬁrst operations of love. The problem is the dominance of violence. The rich are guilty of our poverty. This is axiomatic. Natural language is guilty of the robot’s dumbness. There are no technologies of the social, though the social appears technologically, because attachment is non-technological, non-purposive. It’s impossible to really feel loved by something or someone that only gives me what I have already asked for.

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Social life is fragmented by value. Badly translated between one kind of life and another, at times I try to make myself understandable to my enemies, and at times I become incomprehensible to my friends. A few days ago I said goodbye to someone I love and don’t know when I will see again.

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That's something I can't understand
(The song I mentioned in my presentation.)

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I firmly support the revolution of Bichon Frise's haircut, but not this one. （Before/After）

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Since I promised my friend’s friends to design for their new bar before the class started, I've had to juggle the course, assignments, and 3 bosses this week. In China, many petty proprietors will start construction immediately after they rent their shops, my design and the construction are carrying out simultaneously. I was asked to be on-site on Monday night, therefore I didn’t read Hannah Black’s article. This is the first time I work as an individual designer for a fee, and I somewhat regret taking the job, but it also reminds me that if I wanted to concentrate on my research in the future, I should refuse other tasks.

I still felt a little nervous just like taking an IELTS speaking test in the first week when I spoke English. And now, I overcame it. Even if I forget the word I want to say for a while, it's not a big deal for me anymore. I was looking forward to the presentation on Friday because communicating with the creators is one of the intentions of studying in RCA.

I enjoyed the materials which were shared in class, each of them is worth reading/ watching /listening carefully. I finally had the time to read Hannah Black's article this weekend. I was surprised to find that many of the situations and ideas mentioned in the article coincide with my ideas in the group project. I took a lot of reading notes and invite my group members to read it again. Because I saw many students who complained about the difficulty of reading this article in WeChat, I think they may not be patient enough to read it. I can't say that I have fully understood the article, but I was inspired. I think we all have the same language skills. If someone read this article carefully, he/she won't just complain about its difficulty.

Maybe it’s also one of the problems with social networks. For example, many people who haven't finished reading One Hundred Years Of Solitude commented on the book rating apps, saying that the names in the book are too long to be remembered, then the other users see their reviews and miss one of the greatest fictions. (Many people mentioned that the names in the book are too long to be remembered when they talk about this fiction with me, I think most of them just hear about it but never read it yet.)

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abC = art books in China
Nothing to share, over-commercialized compared to which in the last years.

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I have designed some for them!

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I spent a lot of time on thinking about the title of the essay, the concept of our group project, and reading, including Donna Harraway's article and Invisible Love by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt.

At first, I wanted to write about negative identities in social networks. My definition of it was  the derogatory identities which do not have a clear objective standard. This is about discrimination and reflects some values of Chinese people in modern society.

When I realized that I need to focus on only one field or one word, I gradually lost interest in studying this topic. Despite I distaste these words, many people do not care them and even use these words to make fun of themselves. For the moment I didn't know how to fight the tide. Does my idea make sense? I have to think it over.

But there is a identity that I think it is a complete joke, Brother A-Zhong. The coinage, whether coined by the netizens or Chinese official medias, has been popular since the summer of 2019, but it has also made many Chinese people, including me, nauseated. Using the fan support mechanism to call on young netizens to endorse the country (or government), let the nation live in the illusion of its fans, just like their imagine of the male stars. I think this is not only an insult to my homeland, but also to most of the Chinese people, including me. According to the propaganda of the official medias, we are all the members of Brother A-Zhong’s 1.4 billion followers.

Nevertheless, I will shake off my prejudice and try my best to objectively evaluate the issue through the theory and relevant materials. I am glad for that I can evaluate this objectively, but I'd rather it never happened.

*(Older) Brother is a fans' pet name(title) for male celebrities, originated in Korea (Oppa)

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“After lockdown, there are decisions to be made. Are the arts essential, or a nice luxury?” By Lubaina Himid

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“After lockdown, there are decisions to be made. Are the arts essential, or a nice luxury?” By Lubaina Himid

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In my view, shared spaces for making – like the print room at the University, equipped for lithography, screenprinting, etching – are vitally important. Universities are rightly realising that there are hundreds of courses that can happen without having 120 people sitting in a lecture theatre. But to lump all courses together in that respect would be very dangerous.

Art courses rely on being in a space together, students popping in and seeing what one another are doing. Skill-sharing and encouragement happens as students come and go, and I think there’s enormous potential for that to become a model for education more broadly.

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I spent a lot of time working in the group this week. Four weeks had passed, the members' topic selections are still very broad. Without the guidance of teachers, the discussions are really inefficient. Although I recognize the existence of the problem, it is not easy to convince everyone. Many of us spent a lot of time on this, although the method is not necessarily appropriate. I know this is a normal stage for a group project, and I hope it is also the beginning of a great work.

This week’s extracurricular reading also related to the group project. I read an essay focus on the influence of WeChat use of the older generation on kinship. It inspired me how to reflect the changes from a sociological point of view. In this article, the author mentioned a well-known sociological viewpoint, called the pattern of different sequences. He described the social relationship of Chinese people as being centered on themselves and spread out like water ripples. It can shrink, and it produces different circles with the changes in time and space. Western society is based on the individuals, and the relationship between people is like a bundle of firewood, as clearly organized groups.

At the weekend, I refused my mother’s invitation to travel with her. I originally planned to use it to write a thesis, but the new mattress I bought was too big and I had to rearrange the room. Maybe I inhaled too much dust in the process of cleaning old books, I got cold.

What’s more, my pufferfish died last week. I bought two Ranchu goldfish this weekend. I hope they are healthy, so do I.

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Oil use makes our daily spaces, our routines, our repeated consumption, dull, repetitive and more or less predictable; it smooths the texture of our lives out so their is nothing unexpected or wild. When we see no variation in this ordering of everything immediate to out existence as consumers we do not register more important changes happening at a larger scale.

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Our subjectivities are suffused with the influence of oil so much so that nothing can be done without relating to it. Oil produces the conditions of thinking, feeling and being. It orders relationships to other people, landscapes, and non-human things. You enact this sense of self even if you never give it much consideration.

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Petro-subjectivity is more natural, more normal to us than the things that we really need——that is, a healthy, functioning global ecosystem——that we destroy to get it. We need to learn how to pay attention to how we enact our petro -subjectivity and what is unleashes.

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The first article talked about a series of potential risks that people rely on and trust robots too much. Including the danger of emergencies, autonomous driving, and so on. For people in modern society, these warnings are necessary.

I think the dependence on technology and machinery also exists in art and design. Many creators rely too much on procedural technology to create spectacles while ignoring the output of opinions. For example, in my previous studies in the School of Architecture, many students were committed to making the most realistic renderings, but the design itself is lackluster; or using new algorithms to create different shapes without thinking about the reasons for doing so. I once saw a device that can change according to the heartbeat at the graduation exhibition of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but it has been broken from the opening to the closing of the exhibition. What is the purpose of this work being created and exhibited?

The content of the second article is about "transhumanism". I am not very interested in this. I feel that birth, old age, sickness, and death are the nature of the world. The absence of disease and aging may indeed be a good thing for individuals, but it will also bring many problems, such as the consolidation of class and power. However, seeing a sick puppy lying on my bed, my idea is not firm. If I have the chance to lengthen its life, I would make it at all costs, so that our life span can be the same.

I don't think that the potential of human beings must be stimulated to the maximum by prolonging their lifespan. Each generation has its
tasks, and the loss of a person will not be a loss to the world, whoever he or she is. I just don't know how to say goodbye.

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I was sick for four days this week, and my learning efficiency is pretty bad. I wanted to finish my essay draft, but I even didn’t start writing and still at the stage of research. This allows me to reflect about my health. Because I haven't been sick for a long time, even the months I only slept for three hours a day before the deadline of portfolio submitting. I lived on coffee and Red Bull, I did not get sick, so that I have not paid much attention to my lifestyle. Isn't this the topic of these two weeks! Our world and materiality. Even my illness this time has nothing to do with my lifestyle, but it warned me! Sustainable development is not only a social issue but also a personal issue!

We also welcomed our new members of group project this week, however, there is no process. Most members felt tired due to the essay and homework, had nothing to share during the meeting. The outcome of our group project is so uncertain……

For weekend, I went to the pet market and bought two new goldfish. I named them Cheechee (the one with pink head looks like lychee)and Turtleson (Sichuan slang, because the head tumor on my fish's head looks like a piece of salmon, and the pronounciation of salmon and turtle in Chinese is same) I also saw many cute kittens. When I have my own home, it will definitely be a zoo! (To some extent, my room is already.)

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When I was ill last week, I thought it would be perfect if I don’t feel sick. However, I spend another terrible week with new ailments, including headaches, earaches, and nightmares. I think it may be due to that I always lived in the noise and the fear of impending noise.

I woke up from crying on Friday because my puppy Mantoto dead in my nightmare. He is also sick recently. The aging and death of a puppy is a sensitive topic for me. Although Mantoto is only three years old now, it will be an elderly dog ​​when I finish my master's degree, and then I might not live at home anymore. When I woke up from the bad dream, I looked the answers of "how to overcome the grief of your puppies’ death" on Quora, saw that many puppies live less than 12 years old due to various diseases and accidents, which is about the average life span of a dog. It was even more difficult to distinguish between dream and reality in an instant. My eyes were swollen all day.

For my performance of speaking 3, I think I didn’t control the conversation, due to my mental state and the lack of experience. I prepared five questions and I wanted to ask only one person to answer each question, but in that situation, you want to hear everyone's opinions on the question. For example, the meaning of “technology of love” in the context of Hannah Black, but in the end, both of them digressed. In the end, only two or three of the five questions were discussed. I selected them randomly, so the theme is not clear enough.

Interrupting Weining is an improvement for me because interrupting is considered disrespectful in China. People have to wait for someone to finish saying what he has said. Although what he said may not relate to what you mean. I was also publicly scolded by a  teacher for this. He interrupted me first, and then said a lot of irrelevant words based on his understanding, and as soon as my “No” was spoken, he became furious. I have hardly interrupted anyone since then. Because for the people around me, there is no reason for interrupting.

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INFORM | Contrasting colors and characters in a compact layout.

ENTERTAIN | The most recognizable symbols are placed in the central part.

PERSUADE | The desriptions are full and limited in word count.