Project Summary (within 250 words)
This project investigates emotional numbness in contemporary Chinese digital dating culture through the lens of Eva Illouz’s theory of cold intimacies. While dating apps promise efficiency and expanded choice, they often produce emotional distance, standardization, and strategic interaction rather than closeness. In the Chinese context, these platform logics intersect with culturally specific factors such as euphemistic communication, filial expectations, class-based evaluation, censorship, and therapeutic dating discourses, resulting in a distinctly “cooled” form of intimacy.
The project takes the form of an experimental digital dating platform designed for pets, using pet profiles as a metaphor for human dating practices. By removing images and relying entirely on text, the platform foregrounds language as the primary medium through which compatibility, value, and morality are inferred. Participants create textual pet profiles using culturally loaded descriptors—such as habits, temperament, lifestyle, and MBTI types—that implicitly signal class, family background, and social desirability. Participants then swipe, like, and interpret these profiles, collectively producing judgments around specific phrases.
Interpretations and evaluations are visualized in real time through an installation: favored descriptors rise, while stigmatized ones sink, exposing how language becomes a tool for ranking and exclusion. Printed profiles displayed in the exhibition space further echo public marriage markets and the commodification of intimacy.
Through this playful yet critical framework, the project aims to make visible how euphemism, coded language, and therapeutic scripts rationalize romance and produce emotional distance in Chinese digital dating culture. Rather than framing numbness as a personal failure, the project reveals it as a structurally and culturally produced condition shaped by platforms, social norms, and market logic.
Show some and hide some
高帅没钱 - 矮丑有钱 高丑 - 矮帅 高帅有钱家里不满意你 - 高帅没钱家里满意你
用一些隐晦的phrasing来解读比较两个人配不配
：刷到过小红书那种表格，让人比较两个人的profile看有没有一方是高攀的
然后每次表格里都会带一些主观的phrasing，评论区的解读都很有意思
包括can we date this man
言语是可以如何隐藏信息的，以及在中国环境下，这样的隐藏信息是怎样被解读的以及比较的