Mingxi Hu

My doctoral project, Reconstructing Memory, Making Self: Participatory Art with Migrants in Shenzhen, investigates how community-based artistic practices centred on memory reconstruction can support migrants in articulating identity through participatory encounters with contemporary art. Shenzhen, shaped by rapid urban transformation and internal migration, provides a critical site for examining how poetic, material, and algorithmic forms mediate the expression of memory and belonging.

The research is practice-based and develops a multimodal methodology that combines participatory art, autoethnography, cultural memory theory, remediation, and procedural poetics. It is structured around three interwoven components: site-responsive installations in collaboration with Shenzhen art museums, an AI poetry platform that translates memory fragments into generative texts, and a participatory archive of memory-objects contributed by migrant residents. Together, these practices form a framework for negotiating fragmented experiences of displacement and identity through collective, affective, and co-created processes.

The project contributes to socially engaged art and digital poetics by embedding generative AI within a participatory framework. Unlike computational poetics that emphasise formal autonomy, here AI functions as a relational translator, co-creating with participants to articulate ineffable aspects of migration. The long-term collaborations with local art institutions reinforce a situated curatorial model that links participatory memory work with digital experimentation, offering transferable insights into how artistic practice can mediate migrant identity in contexts of urban precarity and transformation.