A glitch in the feed, appearing outside the algorithm (2025)
This project examines situated imagery from China’s short-video platforms within the global fashion image regime, arguing that platform- and capital-driven aesthetic homogenisation exports thresholds of visibility, speakability, and nameability as a universal template.
It positions fashion imagery as both research and method, treating non-normative styling as enunciation and, through a high-formality photographic grammar, rewriting the camera’s preset parameters for what counts as “fashion.” It affirms these local practices as a parallel syntax of style, rather than a low-tier derivative of a central paradigm.
Conceiving the image as a site of resistance, the project intervenes in the distribution of the sensible within power and calls for a new order of looking, enabling those rendered imperceptible and excluded to re-enter the discursive core of fashion imagery on their own terms.
About Xufei Zhang
Xufei Zhang is a Chinese image-maker working between London and China. She previously studied Fashion Design at Idyllwild Arts Academy in California and later graduated from the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, where she studied Fashion Design and Development.
Her practice unfolds through photography, image-making, and the photobook. Working across analogue and digital processes, she treats the image as a site where visibility is constructed and perception is conditioned.
Engaging fashion as both material and operative structure, her work examines how visual systems shape what can be seen, recognised, and desired. Rather than stabilising the subject, her images disrupt familiar modes of reading through shifts in framing, gesture, and spatial arrangement.
The body in her work does not appear as a fixed form, but emerges through the image itself, fragmented, mediated, and contingent on the conditions of its visibility. [Official Website]
