2026

Nianyu Chen (Ann)

Nianyu Chen is a multidisciplinary designer and researcher with a background in both graphic and media design. Her practice mainly focuses on graphic design, publishing, and layout, while gradually expanding into dynamic images, installation art, and interactive media. Through research-orientated methods, she explores themes such as language, memory, identity, and communication systems, transforming complex social and cultural issues into visual experiences across multiple media. She particularly pays attention to how design can go beyond printed pages and create interactive forms with physicality, participation, and spatiality.

Puddle in Place

This project focuses on water pits in daily paths. Through the two paths of mapping and reflection, it explores the dual attributes of water pits as both ‘spatial structure’ and ‘visual surface’.

The project combines photography, data analysis and various printing experiments to document the shape of water puddles, the texture of the ground and the reflected content. Finally, it integrates images, information and materials into a book format, allowing for a new observation of the overlooked surfaces and reflection phenomena in the city.

Composite materials books A4 size 2026

Speech as Structure

This project explores how language is influenced by physical conditions rather than existing purely in a completely free form. The project originated from the author’s orthodontic treatment experience. By introducing different substances to interfere with the speaking process, it studies the interrelationships between the body, speech, and control systems.

At the same time, the project examines how resistance, temperature, elasticity, and obstacles affect the rhythm, pauses, and pronunciation of speech. By converting sound into visual trajectories, language is not only redefined as something that is spoken but also regarded as a physical structure that can be observed, compared, and analysed.

Double-sided Poster & Foldable Booklet.

The film combines close-up mouth recordings with generative visuals developed in TD. Using a system titled ‘Speech Trace’, it transforms speech into visual trajectories that preserve pauses, rhythm, and intensity, questioning whether language is ever fully under our control.

The Shining

This archival publication reinterprets ‘The Shining’ through repetitive typography, fragmented layouts, and collapsing narrative structures. Using the visual language of institutional records and psychological documents, it transforms themes of isolation and mental decline into an unstable reading system where archives become evidence of collapse.

Mixed material archive design.

Nianyu Chen (Ann)

Email address

Instagram

Web Portfolio

Biography