My proposed project aims to explore how modern Chinese dating culture relies on textual cues, such as euphemisms, coded language, and subtle class markers, to evaluate compatibility. In contemporary digital dating, language does not simply describe a person, but it performs judgment, signals value, and produces emotional distance. This project uses fictional pet profiles as a metaphor for human dating profiles to highlight how personal qualities are simplified, interpreted, and ranked. By deliberately removing photos, the project emphasizes how language itself becomes the primary tool for judgment and evaluation, rather than embodied presence or emotional encounter.

This project is inspired by the self-promotion mechanisms embedded in digital dating platforms. As Malinowska notes, “self-promotion is amplified online because a photo and a short text pitch are the central way to make an impression and to secure matches and thus has direct impact on success”. At the same time, such carefully orchestrated presentations become normalized, producing what she describes as a culture of acceptable and collective lying, where exaggeration and strategic self-description are expected rather than exceptional. In the Chinese context, this strategic self-presentation often takes the form of euphemism and indirect phrasing, making interpretation itself a key social skill in dating.

The project takes the shape of a digital dating platform designed for pets. The experience is divided into three parts: creating profiles, swiping through others’ profiles, and interpreting textual descriptions. Participants first scan a QR code to enter the platform and create a purely textual profile for a real or imaginary pet. A structured template is provided, offering culturally loaded descriptors such as habits that imply family background, temperament framed as moral character, and MBTI types. These descriptors encourage participants to input euphemistic information that is implicit and open to interpretation. All profiles are stored on the platform and made available for browsing. Participants can swipe and like profiles and also the specific descriptions inside the profiles using either their phones or a central touchscreen installation. They are also encouraged to write their own interpretations of specific phrases or descriptors they encounter. Texts that receive interpretive input are highlighted. When these highlighted texts are selected on the touchscreen, the interpretations appear on a larger screen behind it. Over time, descriptors that receive the most likes and the least likes are visualized as floating labels on the large screen: “liked” labels rise upward, while “unfavored” labels sink downward. This visual contrast exposes how certain traits are collectively valued or stigmatized through language. In addition to the digital interaction, participants can print their profiles as posters and place them in the exhibition space, echoing the atmosphere of public marriage markets and reinforcing the sense of commodification and market logic.

The choice to use pet profiles is intentional. Asking participants to create human dating profiles may cause discomfort or emotional vulnerability. Pets offer a light and humorous metaphor that creates distance while still revealing deeply human patterns of judgment. Pets are not neutral beings. They are shaped, described, and projected upon by their owners as humans. Through pet profiles, exaggerated yet recognizable traits, such as family wealth, lifestyle, discipline, and personality, can be abstracted into symbolic features. For example, “always walked by a nanny in a baby stroller” can easily be read as a marker of economic privilege. The metaphor allows participants to recognize social logic without directly exposing themselves.

In relation to Eva Illouz’s concept of cold intimacies, the project shows how the pursuit of intimacy becomes rationalized, standardized, and calculable through textual interpretation. Textual labels replace embodied encounters, and emotional engagement is mediated by comparison, optimization, and risk management. Rather than emerging from emotional closeness, intimacy is approached strategically, producing a colder form of connection.

Culturally, the project reflects key characteristics of Chinese online dating norms. These include reliance on coded phrasing and euphemism, moral judgments embedded in personality labels, and an expectation that meaning should be inferred rather than stated explicitly. In Chinese communication, people often avoid saying things directly, yet expect others to understand what is being implied. This project makes that interpretive process visible and collective.

The project also speaks to the rise of contemporary Chinese therapeutic culture, particularly the popularity of dating tutorials, emotional self-help content, MBTI compatibility guides, and “red flag / green flag” discourse on social media platforms. These cultural forms teach people how to date, how to respond, and how to evaluate others, turning intimacy into a learned and repeatable practice. By inviting participants to interpret and judge language together, the project raises questions about whether contemporary intimacy is still driven by inner feeling or increasingly shaped by socially disciplined scripts.

Ultimately, this project aims to expose how euphemistic and coded language structures romantic expectations in Chinese digital dating culture. It reveals how “hidden information” is interpreted, moralized, and ranked, and how digital platforms turn dating into a process of sorting, labeling, and optimization. The project invites the audience to feel how therapeutic culture, social judgment, and emotional distance operate beneath the euphemisms that contemporary Chinese dating culture relies on. At the same time, it seeks to foreground the concealed pragmatic considerations, such as economic stability, social compatibility, and future security, that play a crucial role in emotional cooling in the Chinese digital dating culture.