Jingyi Ling

FNAR Thesis2026

Students

Jingyi Ling
Department
Fine Arts

Jingyi Ling is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, and performance. Jingyi’s practice begins with space itself. She searches for openings - doors, windows, ventilation systems, cracks in the floor - not as incidental features, but as structural logic. The more closures a room contains, the more openings it must also hold. Her work starts with this paradox, twisting the relationship between opening and closure to keep a space’s dynamic in constant motion.

Before any material decisions, Jingyi’s process typically begins with a series of actions she calls Room Tests - rule-based yet intuitive performances carried out inside the space. These may involve measuring, drawing or sustained physical acts. Through this prolonged negotiation with a room, she traces its latent logic - its resistances, its rhythms - in order to later recalibrate them.

White bars are suspended from the ceiling
Jingyi Ling

Working with materials calibrated to different degrees of transparency - water, light, silkscreen, plexiglass - Jingyi builds installations that negotiate between the visible and the withheld. The interventions are often small: amplifying the slow shift of daylight, inserting a floating line, redirecting a pathway. Through these quiet gestures, she renders the familiar geometry of a room newly negotiable.

For Jingyi, a work remains unfinished until it meets a viewer. Until that moment, it stays open - suspended in uncertainty. She wants that uncertainty to carry through the encounter: for viewers to enter without a script, unsure of what the space asks of them, and to find themselves conscious of what it might mean to move through, or within, a work.

Jingyi received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2023 and received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.

This work was included in Under Scores, the 2026 Weitzman Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition.

White bars are suspended from the ceiling
Jingyi Ling
White bars are suspended from the ceiling
Jingyi Ling
White bars are suspended from the ceiling
Jingyi Ling
White bars are suspended from the ceiling
Jingyi Ling