WELCOME

欢迎

Welcome

Date: May 2024 - Oct 2024
Location: Nanshan, Shenzhen, China
Size: 3m*2m*2m
Material: board, bird spikes, light clay, paper tube, tinfoil, electronic motor

close-up of a hanging stroke: white clay spikes with red tips on a tan board, in front of black cloth

looking up into the installation: white spiked clay forms and red spikes tangled on strings

three spiky white strokes with red spikes hanging in a row against black, like pieces of a character

CONCEPTUALIZATION

The concept of this installation was born from a session at a community class designed for children struggling with reading or cognitive challenges. I was the instructor that day.

After we wrapped up, the children, restless yet curious, gathered around a table as we began to read a picture book together. Their attention floated, dispersing like bubbles in soda—tiny sparks of focus rising only to burst and disappear. These bubbles, fragile and unrestrained, slowly dissolved into the air, merging with the room, slipping beyond my reach.

We were reading a picture book about dinosaurs, a subject I had hoped would tether their wandering minds. I turned the page to reveal the Tyrannosaurus Rex. At that moment, the air seemed to shift, and the children’s eyes—scattered just moments ago—began to gravitate back toward the book.

Then, the small boy beside me, just five years old and not yet in school, a child who struggles so deeply to make sense of written words, suddenly blurted out, "Sissi, I don't want to look at dinosaurs anymore!"

I paused. This was strange. After all, his two great loves were pizza and dinosaurs, especially the T. Rex.

I asked him why. His voice, small yet bursting with an almost desperate frustration, answered: "When I point at the book, my finger hurts. I can’t grab onto the words—they’re slipping away, all twisted and wrong. It feels like the words in the book are stabbing me."

In that moment, through the raw pain etched into his tiny face and clenched hand, I felt, perhaps for the first time, the profound helplessness that resides in such struggle. There was something sharp, ungraspable, in his gaze—a kind of deep ache I had never fully understood. It was as though he was battling a storm within the confines of his own mind, a storm I could barely touch. I realized then that I wanted to hold onto this moment, not just for him, but for the hundreds of others like him, and translate it into something tangible, something visceral. Through the medium of installation art, I wanted to preserve this fleeting yet profound experience.

the community class: children around a green table in a library, reading a picture book together

a drawing in black ink of a hand whose fingers turn into jagged zigzags, with red marks where it hurts, and the character 疼 (hurt) beside it

RESEARCH

HOW DO DYSLEXIC KIDS READ TEXTS?

欢迎 written aligned next to a misaligned version where the parts of each character are shifted out of place — (a)**Misaligned**Misalignment in Chinese dyslexia reflects difficulties in visual tracking and spatial processing. Chinese children with dyslexia often struggle with the precise positioning of characters and strokes, leading to reading challenges due to poor visuo-spatial integration and oculomotor coordination (Peng et al., 2017).

欢迎 next to a mirrored version of the characters, flipped left to right — (b)**mirrored**This symptom refers to reversing or flipping characters, which can result from impaired orthographic awareness. Since Chinese characters are highly visual and not alphabet-based, children with dyslexia may misinterpret orientations, a phenomenon particularly noticeable in logographic languages like Chinese (Ho et al., 2004; Gao et al., 2019).

欢迎 next to a version with strokes and radicals missing — (c)**missing parts**Children may read or write characters with omitted strokes or radicals due to deficits in morphological awareness. Each radical in a Chinese character carries meaning, and failure to recognize them results in incomplete or misread words, which significantly hampers reading fluency (Wang et al., 2017).

欢迎 next to a distorted, stretched and warped version — (d)**distorted**Distortions in perception arise from poor rapid automatized naming (RAN) abilities. These deficits affect the ability to decode characters swiftly, resulting in jumbled or misshaped visual processing of the text (Cao et al., 2017). This aligns with studies showing how Chinese dyslexics display delays in processing phonetic and semantic information.

欢迎 next to a shadowy version where several blurred copies overlap — (e)**shadowy, overlapping**Overlapping text illustrates the cognitive overload caused by poor phonological and orthographic integration. Dyslexic children may experience a "crowding" effect, where excessive visual stimuli interfere with character recognition, making reading more challenging (Tong et al., 2017; Ho et al., 2007).

Most of the time, these ways of perception don't occur alone, they would combine and create images tougher to decode for dyslexic kids.

NEUROBIOLOGY OF DYSLEXIA

figure 2, regions of the reading brain: a brain with the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes, the dorsal decoding pathway in red and the ventral sight-recognition pathway in green

Fig2. Regions of reading brains

The Neurobiology of Dyslexia

The primary difference between developing readers with dyslexia and their peers with typical reading skills is that those with dyslexia show less increase in brain activation in the temporoparietal regions and the occipitotemporal regions during reading and rhyming tasks.

Click to download the book ↗

From a scientific standpoint, children with dyslexia often experience spatial distortions when they read Chinese characters. The complexity of each character—made up of multiple radicals and components—can lead to a visual jumble. The characters twist, the radicals slip out of place, and their eyes leap across the page, missing the steady rhythm that most of us take for granted. My installation focuses precisely on this: the misalignment and overlapping of different character components, the chaos where meaning falls apart.

BRAINSTORM

PROJECT SKETCH

white line sketch on black of 欢 built from twisted hollow tubes — (a)**Twisted Hollow Columns**An abstract representation of how children with dyslexia perceive the curvature of Chinese characters. The cylindrical mural reflects flexibility and fluidity.

white line sketch on black of a character made of clustered circles — (b)**Foam Ball Combinations**Organically communicate the drifting, elusive nature of Chinese characters as seen by dyslexic children, while also conveying a sense of fragility and ephemerality.

white line sketch on black of a character whose strokes cross and fold into sharp geometric planes — (c)**Crossed and Folded Strokes in Characters**The normally firm strokes of Chinese characters become sharp and structured. This geometric abstraction of the strokes conveys that children with dyslexia approach reading as though they are observing a drawing rather than text.

我的 drawn in thick multicoloured layers like a contour map — (d)**Multicolored Layers Resembling a Contour Map**This primarily expresses how characters hold depth and dimensionality for dyslexic readers, making them as difficult to conquer as a series of mountain peaks.

front view sketch of the installation: scattered character parts hanging from a rail at the top

top view sketch on a grid: coloured dots marking each part and its direction of movement

(e)Front view and top view sketch of the installation.

PROTOTYPING

Visual analysis

a hand holding a soft cotton-wrapped wire character — (a)A cotton-wrapped wire frame that is lightweight and cozy but fragile and less durable.

a character bent from wire, lying on paper — (b)Bent wire typography, minimal and easy to shape but lacking volume.

white foam balls joined with sticks into a molecule-like character — (c)Foam ball structures connected by sticks, playful with added depth but may feel too scientific.

a mix of fabric, foam balls and wire forms on a wooden table — (d)Fabric, foam, and wire, visually rich and diverse but potentially cluttered.

FINAL DESIGN

欢迎 broken apart: its strokes scattered and overlapping in grey and black inside a square — (a)

欢迎 with its strokes back in place, clear and readable, a few grey ghosts still trailing — (b)

After experimenting with different materials and structures, I decided to cut down the original phrase "欢迎来到我的世界" (Welcome to my world) to just two characters, "欢迎" (Welcome). I believe that this reduction not only promotes flexible thinking but also prevents the character components from colliding during movement.

When designing the motion paths, I experimented with movement in different directions. Through repeated trials, I adjusted the speed to ensure that, at a specific moment during the movement, the chaotic strokes would align into clear, precise Chinese characters—returning to their proper place, readable and neat, as shown in diagram (b).

I envision this as a piece of 4D art. I’ve introduced a fourth dimension: time. The installation doesn’t only exist in three dimensions, where the radicals scatter and occupy different spatial nodes. The mechanical movement in the piece isn’t just for show; it represents the continuous, unrelenting battle dyslexic individuals face when trying to decode Chinese characters. The letters twist and flail before finally, after an agonizingly long cycle, assembling into the word 欢迎. This brief moment of clarity, where the chaos subsides and meaning emerges, mirrors the moments of breakthrough that dyslexic individuals experience after enduring long bouts of frustration and confusion.

CONSTRUCTION

cardboard tubes standing upright on a board in the outline of the frame — (a)

the linear motor: a stepper motor on an aluminium rail with its controller and wires — (b)

the motor system laid out with labelled notes: power supply, stepper motor, rail, control board — (b)2

sissi kneeling on the floor wiring and calibrating the motor rail — (c)

spiky paper sculptures of strokes, white with red spikes, on cardboard stands — (d)

the final layout on a table: many spiky stroke sculptures together with the motor system — (e)

(a) Cardboard tubes are arranged into a framework, setting the structural foundation.

(b) & (b2) The linear motor system is assembled, connecting the power supply, stepper motor, rail, and control components.

(d) Sculptural elements with spiked paper designs are added, creating visual complexity.

(e) The final layout integrates the motor system and sculptural forms, forming an interconnected installation.

FINAL DISPLAY

the finished installation hanging in the dark: spiky white and red strokes on strings, partway to forming 欢

the whole installation from the front: all the strokes of 欢迎 hanging in the air on black

Just as in life, this calm is temporary. The machine doesn’t stop; it begins again, plunging the characters back into disorder. The cycle repeats endlessly, much like the relentless, daily struggle of those with dyslexia—each day a waiting game for meaning to emerge out of the chaos. The installation captures this quiet, ceaseless endurance. A visual representation of the inner storm, the fight for understanding, the friction and tension that dyslexic individuals live with, as they wait, day after day, for those fleeting moments when the words finally make sense.

WORK CITED

[1] Cao, F., et al. "Neural Signatures of Phonological Deficits in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia." NeuroImage, vol. 146, 2017, pp. 301-11.
[2] Ho, C. S. H., et al. "The Cognitive Profile and Multiple-Deficit Hypothesis in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia." Developmental Psychology, vol. 38, no. 4, 2002, pp. 543-553.
[3] Peng, P., et al. "The Deficit Profiles of Chinese Children with Reading Difficulties: A Meta-Analysis." Educational Psychology Review, vol. 29, no. 3, 2017, pp. 513-64.
[4] Tong, X., et al. "Three-Year Longitudinal Study of Reading and Spelling Difficulty in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia." Dyslexia, vol. 23, no. 4, 2017, pp. 372-86.
[5] Wang, L. C., et al. "Development of Lexical Tone Awareness in Chinese Children with and without Dyslexia." Contemporary Educational Psychology, vol. 49, 2017, pp. 203-14.