I earned my bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Jilin University in China, with my interests mainly on Marxism and critical theory. In the next a few years I moved to London and then Amsterdam, where I studied philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, and especially the early philosophy of Wittgenstein. In my master’s thesis, I proposed a radical interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as an antirepresentationalist project. After spending a year working on my PhD project at the University of Zürich, I become a member of the eikones center in September 2024.

My doctoral project sees images as cognitive vehicles and takes them as good examples for developing a structuralist theory of representation. This theory regards representation as a cognitive activity focusing on grasping the structural information of objects, contrasting with another cognitive activity I call interpretation. Accordingly, I propose a pragmatist approach to specifying the structural information of images, asserting that the structure of an image must be understood within a system formed by the image and the object it represents, where the structure is the invariant (shared) content between the image and the represented. This theory of representation is initially influenced by the early Wittgenstein’s work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), and especially its new interpretations. My research is also inspired by the works of neo-pragmatist and expressivist philosophers (such as Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, Huw Price), and (even) Deleuze and Guattari.