Distributed Bodies: Towards an Aesthetics of Amorphous Design (PLATES Body Issue Book Talk and Exhibition) | November 5-30, 2025

Distributed Bodies:
Towards an Aesthetics of Amorphous Design

PLATES Body Issue Book Talk and Exhibition
Presented by RELATED DEPARTMENT and Page Bureau

Book Talk
November 5, Wednesday, 7pm, RSVP suggested

Speaker
Scarlett Meng, Can Yang, Tiger Dingsun

Exhibition
November 5 - 30

at Bungee Space,
13 Stanton St, NY, NY 10002

Join us at Bungee Space on November 5 at 7 PM for a conversation with the editors, designers, and contributors of PLATES, an experimental publication by RELATED DEPARTMENT and Page Bureau exploring contemporary design practice and criticism. The talk, Distributed Bodies: Towards an Aesthetics of Amorphous Design, features presentations by Scarlett Meng, Can Yang and Tiger Dingsun, and marks the opening of the site-specific exhibition on PLATES: Body Issue. This program delves into how corporeality, technology, and design intertwine, and investigates how graphic design operates across physical and virtual realms where bodies become data, interfaces, and systems of representation. Through presentation and discussion, the speakers unpack the publication’s design process and conceptual framework, reflecting on how amorphous design practices challenge traditional notions of form, authorship, and materiality.

In its second iteration, PLATES presents collective voices which address issues around a corporal body, a virtual entity, body politic, identity, body mechanics, bodilessness, expressive/performative body, body as tools, or any body issue in relation to their practice.

The physicality of a human body denotes our essential relationship to forms and being. Yet, if placed in different contexts, the notion of body could collapse into a synonym to a surface, a machine, a system, or an automated assemblage in capitalism, media technology, politics, and the Internet. A body could lack transparency, concreteness and authenticity while still claiming its very identity and functionality.

*PLATES is an editorial and curatorial response to contemporary design practice and criticism. Each issue dives into a specific topic that is pertinent to the design reality we live in, presented and archived in a series of image and textual plates in an organic, iterative and evolving format.

About the artists

Scarlett Meng is the founder and creative director of RELATED DEPARTMENT and Page Bureau. RELATED DEPARTMENT is an award-winning design practice based in Shanghai and New York, working with a variety of design forms in response to shifting contexts of post-colonial and digital landscapes. They founded their publishing practice Page Bureau in 2018 and a research division est.dept in 2022. Their work has been exhibited at Power Station of Art in Shanghai, Asia Culture Center in Gwangju and Queens Museum in New York, and has been collected by institutions such as Asia Art Archive, Yale University Library and Asymmetry Art Foundation.

Can Yang is a multidisciplinary artist and visual designer working with a wide range of media to create context-aware graphics. She sees graphic design as a practice of creating daily artefacts using forms or typography as tools, not only for carrying the message but for facilitating cultural and historical values. Her work seeks to evoke renewed approaches to established hierarchies and principles within graphic design and visual communication industry. Besides her individual practice, Can also demonstrates her model of practice, Neobridge, through pedagogical methodologies, i.e collaborative activities, workshops and open-ended conversations. She is currently teaching at Royal College of Art and ual: Chelsea College of Arts in London while working as a design and art director for te magazine.

Tiger Dingsun is a web developer and graphic designer based in NYC. He is currently the web producer at Triple Canopy, an experimental magazine and arts non-profit. Other interests include fandom studies, paleo-archaeology, jungian psychoanalysis, and the poetics of the digital quotidian. More at https://tiger.exposed.

All images courtesy of the artists