I Dream a Lot
but I Never Sleep

Zhongjing Jiang
PhD. Viva Exhibition
20 October – 21 November 2025

Opening Event: 23 October 2025 – 17:00-18:00

This exhibition presents three years of practice-led PhD research by Zhongjing Jiang 江中靖, exploring loneliness, intimacy, and the shifting boundaries between humans and machines. The research was conducted at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), UK, under the supervision of Professor Jean Wainwright, Dr Noradila Nordin, and John Zhang.

At the heart of the installation stands Zhongjing 2.0, a humanoid robotic head modelled on the artist’s own face and animated by a large language model. Both self-portrait and speculative companion, the robot embodies a paradoxical presence—at once personal and machinic, emotional and algorithmic. It does not speak to solve loneliness, but to imagine the possibility of machinic companionship.

Set within an immersive living-room environment, the exhibition invites visitors into a layered world of speculative intimacy. The surreal robotic head is interactive, trained on a custom-designed language model framework responding to themes of loneliness among young adults in the digital era.

Handwritten dialogues from the training dataset are displayed throughout the space, expressing human emotional input in physical form. Nearby, 3D-printed sculptures—derived from workshop participants’ imaginative designs—offer diverse visions of future companionship within this thematic arc. Video works animate the robot’s early conceptual sketches, while surrounding displays of fabrication materials—silicone casting, facial modelling, airbrushed paintings, and iterative sculptural processes—reveal the material labour behind its making.

In this space, visitors are invited to speak with the robot, to listen, to read, to touch, and to dream. The exhibition is not a showcase of technological mastery, but a poetic inquiry into what it means to long for connection in an increasingly algorithmic world. Rather than proposing a cure for loneliness, I Dream a Lot but I Never Sleep reflects on robotic companionship as an unfinished question. It asks what it means to imagine another form of connection in the digital era – and how art might hold that longing.

Artist Bio

Zhongjing Jiang is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of visual culture, robotic art, and experimental practice. She holds an M.A. in Visual Culture Studies from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), UK. She also serves on the International Exchange Expert Committee of the Guangzhou Library.

Zhongjing was awarded the “Artron Cup” Photographer of the Year Award and has exhibited her work through solo and group exhibitions in cities including Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Bangkok, Paris, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles. Her essay collection Unbreakable String (《散珠儿》, 2016) and photo book The Soloist’s Hermitage (《瓜虫》, 2023) were both published by Guangdong People’s Publishing House.

Her early practice explored loneliness and human presence through film photography, with major series such as Shadows and Elegance, Word Game, Love is Death, and Wood and Rock. Since 2022, she has expanded her research into robotic art, combining artificial intelligence, experimental aesthetics, and human–robot interaction to examine how emotional companionship might be reimagined through machine presence.

Email: zhongjingjiang28@gmail.com
Instagram: amelieaj