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What We’re Made to See

JIAYI WANG

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Jiayi Wang is a graphic designer based between London and Shanghai. Her practice spans branding, editorial design, and archive-based research, with a focus on visual storytelling and cultural narratives.

Jiayi Wang is a graphic designer based between London and Shanghai. Her practice spans branding, ...

In patriarchal and capitalist societies, the act of viewing is not neutral—it is structured by systems of power, spectacle, and binary oppositions. In China, state media is widely perceived as an authoritative source of information. CCTV’s annual Spring Festival public service advertisements merge state-directed messaging with culturally familiar family narratives, creating a concentrated platform for examining how gender is visually organized and symbolically naturalized.

This project investigates how gender roles are constructed through such binary visual structures in Chinese national media. Using an archive-based design approach, it analyses eleven years of CCTV Spring Festival PSAs, focusing on three dimensions: language, behaviour, and visual framing. Through typographic separation, juxtaposition, and repetition, the work reveals how patriarchal narratives are embedded within seemingly neutral images—and how graphic design can serve as a tool to expose the invisible biases and exclusions structured by representational systems.

Final work

There are three books placed on the black background, and the covers of the books say who is talking, who is cooking, and who is in the center

Line of enquiry: How can graphic design, as an archive-based practice, perform visual translation to deconstruct patriarchal gender narratives—and make visible the structural biases embedded in binary systems of representation?

Here are 4 pictures, which are the details of the above book

By visualising how authority, speech, labour, and visibility are distributed along gendered lines, the project demonstrates that graphic design is not merely decorative. It is a tool that can challenge familiar visual languages, interrupt normative hierarchies, and generate new ways of seeing. Through this, it asks: when design operates critically within archival material, what previously unseen structures can it help us to notice, feel, and question?

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Research and process

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What We’re Made to See

In patriarchal and capitalist societies, the act of viewing is not neutral—it is structured by systems of power, spectacle, and binary oppositions. In China, state media is widely perceived as an authoritative source of information. CCTV’s annual Spring Festival public service...

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