Xiaoqi Chen
(she/her)
Xiaoqi Chen is a graphic designer and visual storyteller whose practice moves between graphic design, narrative illustration and experimental visual communication. She studied Environmental Design at Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts and is currently undertaking postgraduate study in Graphic Design at the Glasgow School of Art. This interdisciplinary background informs her interest in how bodies, images and spatial systems shape everyday experience.
Her graduate project, The Game in the In-Between, investigates the unspoken social agreements that guide seat selection, personal space and polite avoidance on the Glasgow Subway. Drawing on ethnographic observation, she translates fleeting gestures—an averted gaze, a folded shoulder or an empty seat—into typography, symbols and visual narratives. The project reframes apparent silence and distance not as indifference, but as a subtle form of mutual care between strangers.
Her wider practice is interested in the relationship between visual language, spatial behaviour and everyday systems. Working across editorial design, experimental typography, mapping, illustration and interactive narrative, she often begins with ordinary experiences that are easily overlooked and develops them into visual systems through observation, collection and translation.
Rather than treating graphic design simply as a means of presenting information, Xiaoqi is interested in how design can become a way of reading relationships—between people and space, behaviour and symbols, and individual experience and shared structures. Her work often combines structured research with playful and poetic forms, inviting audiences to observe, interpret and participate rather than receive a fixed conclusion.
Moving forward, she hopes to continue exploring research-led visual communication through publishing, typography and experimental narrative, with particular attention to the subtle systems, behaviours and traces embedded within everyday life.
A GAME OF INTERVALSA – Take a seat
The Game in the In-Between takes the Glasgow Subway as a site of observation, exploring how strangers negotiate personal space through distance, position, gaze and subtle bodily adjustments. It focuses on the unspoken behaviours that are collectively understood in public transport, and how they form a silent spatial language of distance and coexistence.
Through ethnographic observation, spatial recording and visual translation, the project transforms relationships between passengers, movement, distance and behaviour into points, lines, gaps and symbols. These elements are developed into the Keep Your Distance typeface and a series of rule-based visual games.
Presented as a newspaper, the final work combines text, folding, symbols and puzzles to guide readers through a process of observing, recognising, decoding and choosing. Rather than providing a fixed explanation for these behaviours, the project uses visual communication to explore how space becomes information, how behaviour becomes a sign, and how strangers continuously create room for coexistence within the gaps of shared space.
