December 4, 2025
On December 4th, the MFA Design second-year students held their semester review, focused on clarifying and strengthening the direction of their thesis projects ahead of the January–February exhibition period.
The goal of this review was to solidify and refine the aims and specifics of each thesis project, with particular attention to human interaction, physical presence, and exhibition display. Students were asked to present a proof of concept, prototype, mock-up, or work-in-progress at real scale. Rather than showing a complete thesis, the review emphasized testing how an audience might experience and engage with a portion of the work.
Chiyu Zheng
Presence invites participants to interact with an installation through full-body gestures rather than handheld devices. The project responds to how screen-based technologies train bodies to shrink into small, constrained postures. By asking participants to occupy space with their whole bodies, the work reframes technology as something expansive and physically engaging, restoring a sense of scale and presence often lost in digital interaction.
Peyton Chiang
Peyton ’s thesis explores the relationship between corporeal beings and ancestral beings, examining how memory, ritual, and lineage move through physical form. His work draws from ancestral practices and material culture, translating them into sculptural and spatial experiments. Through layered structures and translucent materials, the project investigates how bodies act as vessels for inherited knowledge, belief, and presence. The work-in-progress installation presented at the review focused on scale, verticality, and atmosphere, offering a prototype for how audiences might physically encounter and move around these ancestral narratives.
Anukriti Kaushik
Anukriti’s project explores fertility figurines from the Indus Valley Civilization and how they shifted from everyday objects into museum artifacts. Working with archival material like excavation photos, maps, receipts, and letters, she looks at how repetition, documentation, and displacement change an object’s meaning. Through repeated sculptural reproductions, the figurines slowly transform again, breaking, mutating, and taking on new identities beyond their original role as symbols of fertility.
Yuxuan Hu
This digital art project transforms live sound into visual form using real-time interaction. Audience members speak into a microphone, and their voices are translated into dynamic visual particles that slowly fade over time. Each interaction produces a unique, temporary visual result, emphasizing ephemerality, participation, and the physical presence of sound.
Asem Kiyalova
This project challenges the Western calendar’s linear, productivity-driven structure of time. By questioning how time is measured and organized, the work invites audiences to imagine alternative, shared, and more intuitive ways of marking life. The calendar becomes a speculative space for rethinking planning, value, and connection beyond capitalist frameworks.
Mahsa Masoumi
Sabr explores patience as a transformative force through storytelling with Persian carpet motifs. Anchored in the Persian epic of Zaal and Simorgh, the project weaves cultural symbolism, material practice, and narrative into a contemporary design context. The work examines how time, care, and repetition shape both stories and objects.
