Editors-in-Chief | Alphabetic Order
Dr Niloofar Amini, Lecturer in Environmental Design, University For Creative Arts
Dr Gareth Jones, Senior Lecturer in Design & Media: Research & Theory, University For Creative Arts
Dr  FENG Sha, Associate Professor of Digital Media Arts,  Xiamen University
Dr Jorge Valdovinos, Lecturer in Design & Media: Research & Theory,  University For Creative Arts
Dr Laura Yuile, Lecturer in Digital Media Arts


Associate Editors | Alphabetic Order
Dr Eman AlHabashneh, Professor of American Ethnic Literature and World Cinema, The American University of Madaba
Dr Francesca Brunetti, Lecturer in Design & Media, ISI Florence
Ruehl Muller, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication Design,  University For Creative Arts
Dr Mohammed Ali Sharieff, Principal Architect CHAND Associates, Coimbatore, TN, India
Raynal Somiah, Lecturer in English For Academic Purposes,  University For Creative Arts
Dr Yvan Tina, Lecturer in Digital Media Arts
Zihong Yue, Lecturer in Environmental Design,  University For Creative Arts




Contact Us | studionote@uca.ac.uk
ISSN: 2978-8080 (Print)
E-ISSN: 2978-8099 (Online)

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Editorial Vision
Events
Issues





STUDIO NOTE
IN CONVERSATION - 03
In À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927), Marcel Proust explored how memory does not simply preserve the past but emerges through unexpected encounters between sensation, place, and experience. His notion of involuntary memory reveals a productive misalignment between past and present, where forgotten moments return through fragments, materials, and embodied experiences. Memory is therefore not a fixed record of what has already occurred, but an active process through which new meanings, perceptions, and relationships are continuously produced.

As part of the second issue of Studio Note Journal, “Pre-Fix: Misalignment and Creative Practice Otherwise,” the third roundtable, “Collective Memories, Personal Spaces: Producing New Natures,” explores how misalignment can become a productive condition for generating alternative ways of perceiving, inhabiting, and relating to the world.

Bringing together Dr Di Shao and PAN Feifei, the discussion examines how collective and personal memories are formed through ecological transformations, artistic practices, material processes, and spatial experiences.

Dr Di Shao investigates urban rivers as evolving landscapes where different understandings of nature, culture, and collective memory are negotiated, while PAN Feifei reflects on memory through bodily actions, materials, sound, and space, revealing alternative forms of sensing and knowing. Together, the roundtable considers how moments of misalignment—between past and present, human and environment, material and memory—can open possibilities for producing New Natures: new ways of experiencing, imagining, and constructing relationships with the world.




SPEAKERS
Dr. DI Shao
Dr. Di Shao is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research investigates the historical production of urban nature through river governance across diverse political and historical contexts in the Pearl River Delta. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, Dr. Di Shao explores how biophysical conditions, socio-economic transformations, institutional arrangements, and technical expertise have continuously co-produced urban waterways and new forms of urban nature. Her work further examines how these socio-natural transformations shape everyday experiences, collective memory, affective attachments, and human–environment relationships.
PAN Feifei
PAN Feifei is an artist, educator, and practice-based researcher based at the Institute of Creativity and Innovation, Xiamen University, where she teaches and develops research across experimental moving image, installation, sound, and experimental writing. She is also a Fellow of Advance HE (FHEA). Rooted in personal memory and intergenerational experiences, her practice engages with memory, time, and perception, taking shape through the interplay of bodily actions, material transformations, sound, and space. Repetition, silence, and listening are recurring elements throughout her work. PAN Feifei explores the movement and transformation of memory and perception across different media and contexts, through which questions of labour, gender, and social relations gradually emerge.
Mediator
Stephen Connolly, PhD in Fine Art, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Art, ICI

Dr. DI Shao, DASHA River, Shenzhen - China, 2025      PAN Feifei, Snowman, ICI OPEN Museum, 2026





STUDIO NOTE
IN CONVERSATION - 02

For the purpose of the second roundtable, Liminal Critique: Negotiating Agency Between Art, Design and Property brings together two critical perspectives that examine housing not simply as architecture or real estate, but as a contested spatial, and representational condition. Moderated by Dr. Jorge Valdovinos, the roundtable explores how practitioners and researchers negotiate agency within systems increasingly shaped by financialisation, speculation, and exclusion.
On the 29th May, Kent Mundle, from Hong Kong University, will present By Us, For Us, a cooperative initiative developed through Architecture Land Initiative (ALIN), which investigates alternative and collective models of housing beyond speculative development. His lecture repositions architecture as a form of support rather than commodity, questioning how design can reclaim housing as a social and ecological infrastructure.
In this conversation, Dr. Laura Yuile, through her project ASSET ARREST, approaches financialised housing from the perspective of artistic and spatial practice. Using performative property viewings and podcast-based counter-publicity, her work exposes the atmospheres, rhetorics, and exclusions embedded within luxury real estate.
Together, the session frames liminal critique as a mode of practice operating between art, design, research, and activism—opening space to rethink how housing is imagined, represented, and collectively contested.







SPEAKERS
Kent Mundle
Architect, educator, and researcher specialized in housing, infrastructure, and community development within emerging economies. He is a member of District Development Unit (DDU), an impact enterprise that develops architectural prototypes and implements community infrastructure in countries such as Nepal and the Philippines. At the University of Hong Kong, Kent teaches in the Department of Architecture and contributes to the Rural-Urban Lab, focusing on affordable housing innovations and cooperative building strategies.
Dr. Laura Yuile
An anti-disciplinary artist, researcher and educator from Glasgow. Her practice moves across installation, video, performance, writing and curatorial projects, investigating the cultural infrastructures of real estate, retail and global commodity systems - how surfaces, systems and speculative futures shape the environments we inhabit. Long-term projects including ASSET ARREST and Museum of Modern Shopping function as research platforms, combining fieldwork, exhibitions, podcasts and public interventions to examine and expose the spaces of contemporary capitalism.
Mediator
Dr.Jorge Valdovinos - researcher in Social Sciences specializing in Media, Communication, and Culture. Lecturer in Creative Foundation, ICI.


Kent Mundle, n.d.               Laura Yuile, n.d.


STUDIO NOTE
IN CONVERSATION - 01
We are pleased to announce the inaugural StudioNote Journal roundtable, to be held in April 2026 at ICI.

Titled “Coastal Assemblages: Art, Design and Environment,” this first conversation brings together complementary approaches that explore how cultural, social, and environmental conditions are observed, interpreted, and transformed through practice.
Bridging artistic research and design methodology, both speakers engage deeply with situated knowledge—whether through maritime histories and culinary narratives or ethnographic observation and participatory technologies. Their shared focus on processes of exchange, adaptation, and collective experience reflects the core ambition of StudioNote: to create a platform where disciplines intersect, methods are rethought, and new forms of knowledge emerge through dialogue.




SPEAKERS
Dr. Gabriel N. Gee
An art historian whose research engages maritime cultures and interconnected global histories, Dr. Gee reflects on his 2025 visit to Kinmen and Xiamen. His work explores how maritime heritage, agriculture, and culinary traditions intersect across landscapes. Through the concept of “disciplinary cannibalism,” he blends geography, history, anthropology, and culinary arts, using recipes as narrative and methodological tools to investigate coastal spaces as contact zones shaped by circulation, memory, and habitation.
Zihong Yue
A lecturer in Environmental Design at ICI and a UK ARB registered architect, Zihong Yue’ s practice applies ethnographic methods to examine local social, cultural, and economic conditions. His work translates these observations into participatory design strategies and “socially constructive technologies” that foster community-based innovation and long-term place-making, rooted in local traditions and collective practices.
Mediator
Raynal Somiah, Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes, ICI.


Dr. Gabriel Gee, 2025                 Zihong Yue, Fatty Pot, 2025