ruiying-feng__unknown__ual__2025

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School: RCA
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Year: 2025
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Source: https://ualshowcase.arts.ac.uk/project/663610/cover

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# Project Description

Screened

Ruiying Feng

Summary

Final work

I am an artist whose practice grows from within cosplay culture. Using photography, installation, and mixed media, I explore how identity is performed, constrained, and reimagined. My work often begins with the materials closest to me—wigs, makeup, props, lace, and discarded objects—transforming them into sculptural installations that hold emotional residue and visual memory.

Coming from a background where non-mainstream identities are often censored, I see cosplay not just as fandom, but as a radical form of self-expression. It allows me to slip between roles, test boundaries, and build visual narratives that resist fixed identity. I work with everyday and second-hand materials, echoing the resourcefulness of subcultural communities and the improvisational spirit of DIY practice.

In Archive365 (2025), I preserved used makeup wipes, bandaged selfie lights, and silkscreened cosplay objects as a way of archiving transformation—what happens after the performance ends. The installation reflects on how identity is both masked and revealed, and how fragile materials can carry the weight of personal and political tension.

Through my work, I want viewers to feel they’ve stepped into a space once inhabited—where the body has just left, but its traces remain. I invite them to witness the quiet after a transformation: the soft power of performance, the residue of resistance, and the intimate struggle for visibility.

I am an artist whose practice grows from within cosplay culture. Using photography, installation,...

College Central Saint Martins

Course MA Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies

Graduation year 2025

This project explores the construction and erasure of identity through the visual language of cosplay. By focusing on the act of transformation—putting on makeup, costumes, and roles—and the residues left behind, the work investigates how identities are performed, recorded, and eventually dissolved. Drawing from my own experience within cosplay communities, particularly in a societal context where alternative identities are often suppressed, I approach these textile not as trash but as a quiet archive of selfhood.

The installation reflects on what remains after performance ends: textile stains, damaged props, and dislocated fragments of personas that once mediated between fantasy and reality. I hope to present a space where traces speak louder than presence—where what’s left behind becomes the real portrait.

Final work

Screened

Screened originated from a deeply personal moment: the aftermath of performance. As a cosplayer, I often find myself surrounded by objects—wigs, wings, ties—once the role is over. These are not just props, but material witnesses to transformation, scattered around the room like remnants of someone I used to be.

The original visual idea came from a quiet moment of sitting on the floor after taking off the costume. Nothing theatrical—just disordered hair, wrinkled wings, an undone tie. What moved me was not the image of the character, but the fragments that refused to return to function.

This installation assembles those fragments not as passive leftovers, but as assertive archives. Each object is a survival—of emotion, labor, and imagination. They are not symbols of identity's collapse, but of its resistance to disappearance. I do not mourn their brokenness. I preserve them as evidence of what identity can leave behind, what it takes to construct, and what refuses to vanish.

Screened

Screened

Screened

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This project explores the construction and erasure of identity through the visual language of cosplay. By focusing on the act of transformation—putting on makeup, costumes, and roles—and the residues left behind, the work investigates how identities ar...

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# Links

## Official page
- https://ualshowcase.arts.ac.uk/project/663610/cover

## External
- https://www.instagram.com/raeraeraeisme
- https://plaaaayground.cargo.site/
- tel:07436870248
- mailto:ruiruiecho@gmail.com
- https://forms.arts.ac.uk/client-enquiry-form/
- https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fualshowcase.arts.ac.uk%2Fproject%2F663610%2Fcover&text=Screened
- https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fualshowcase.arts.ac.uk%2Fproject%2F663610%2Fcover&media=https%3A%2F%2Fportfolio-tools.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F06%2F15195940%2F%25E7%25B2%2589%25E8%2589%25B2%25E4%25B8%259D%25E5%25B8%25A6%25E4%25B8%258E%25E9%2593%2581%25E5%259B%25B4%25E6%25A0%258F%25E8%25A3%2585%25E7%25BD%25AE.png&description=Screened