Yuelin Xu
(She/Her)
I am a graphic designer from Yunnan, China, with an ethnic minority background. I am drawn to tactile, process-led design, particularly printing, folding and making by hand. My recent practice explores how images shift in meaning across different contexts, using cat meme culture, Riso printing and interactive structures to investigate ambiguity, interpretation and visual communication.
Between the Turns
The project began by asking whether visual ambiguity could still communicate emotion once cat memes were removed from their original online context. Through recontextualisation, participant testing and image sequencing, I found that removing context does not simply erase meaning. Instead, it makes meaning more unstable, fluid and open to interpretation.
Context does not determine what an image means, but it influences how the image is read. This shifted the project from asking, “What does this cat mean?” to asking, “What happens between images?”
Rather than explaining this conclusion to the viewer, the final publication turns it into a physical experience. Through the structure of the Jacob’s Ladder, the central image remains relatively stable while the images around it continually shift, allowing meaning to emerge, change and move through the relationships between images.
Detail views of the publication and accompanying printed elements, introducing the project’s visual language and the theme of reading between images.
The opening page introduces the visual language of the publication, while enlarged details show the use of focal lines and graphic markers to guide attention and connect fragmented images.
An interactive publication in which a relatively stable cat meme is repeatedly recontextualised through changing image sequences, exploring how meaning emerges between images.